Room for Elephants
10 years ago--even 5 years ago--deconstruction meant something different than it does now. Back then (when cell phones still had hinges) it seemed like a perfect phrase for what I was going through. Like everyone, I had a boat, a house of cards, that I grew up within and was very familiar with. Not a "bubble", per se, but an entire personal framework and foundation for viewing and understanding the world around me. You could almost think of it as my identity; it was the way I interacted with the world, the container in which I held my conception of reality. It was comfortable in my little house, and I had a place to store every single thought or idea.
But then slowly I started encountering things that didn't fit my context of understanding. I was experiencing things that didn’t belong. It was like I was a blind man tripping over invisible objects even though I believed I could see perfectly. There were questions, thoughts, ideas, realities that I realized my worldview was ill-equipped to deal with; there was an elephant in my house of cards, and now it was suddenly a cluttered mess. I didn’t have space to store this new information, and I couldn't deny their existence, so something had to change.
Enter deconstruction.
I had to literally destroy my boat and tear down my house of cards to make way for a new understanding of the world. The old way didn't work anymore--it couldn't--and so I had to find a new way to categorize reality.
I found that my container wasn’t big enough to encompass the awkward, obnoxious, inconvenient elephant named Truth.
My house needed more rooms. (And a new color scheme.)
Now, some of this remodeling work was intentional, a choice to nitpick certain viewpoints or teachings in pursuit of a truth they might otherwise have been obstructing. Some of it was purely cynicism that had metastasized into something more. But much of it was simply a river I found that I had fallen into; an inexorable pull by something deeper and greater than me. The process was acted upon me by an outside presence; I didn’t bring that elephant in on my own, after all--that barged onto the scene like Leonardo DiCaprio’s train in Inception (#spoileralert). And once I was forced to relocate that first card, a whole deck of cards came tumbling to the ground after it. Once I took out one wall, the rest of the house crashed down hard.
That was what deconstruction was like for me.
But in the process, there was always a rebirth happening. Things fell down to make way for a new understanding of life. I had to get rid of the old because I was encountering something new. (The Jesus Way is all about resurrection, after all.) It was like someone had given me that elephant as a gift, so I had to create an entire garden for it to live in. Those walls that were getting torn down were being replaced by sitting rooms full of grace. That bedside cabinet was now a library full of contextual knowledge and subtle nuances to my faith.
The destruction had a purpose, and everything that tasted death was given new life again. It was painful and difficult and confusing and uncomfortable and lonely, but also exhilarating and transforming and life-giving and necessary. This was discipleship, this was Jesus-focused and Jesus-inspired, this was good.
But...that's not how people understand deconstruction today.
Now it's just a demolition.
It's cool, it's trendy, and maybe the people who haven't gone through the need for a real deconstruction have mislabeled something they have experienced as a replacement for the dark night of the soul so that they can feel hip and relevant. (I don't know.)
But what's happened now that “deconstruction” is a buzzword is that there are a bunch of pseudo-enlightened young people who take gleeful pleasure in ripping apart old doctrine just for the sake of watching it burn. There's nothing new or better or bigger taking its place; there’s no elephant standing in the living room. But they watched someone else do it on HGTV once (or they listened to an edgy millennial Christian podcast where someone dropped an F-bomb and said that God might be a woman) and now they think their house needs it, too, when they have neither the skills nor the preparation to do so.
And yes. They're absolutely right. There are many ideas that have run their course and have no more part to play in human history. They should be abandoned, and rightly so. And there are other ideas that we need to hurry up and start adopting.
But I wonder if maybe there are stepping stones on this path; if maybe too many people are trying to make their home in a container that is way too big for their current worldview. If they're somehow skipping part of the path; if perhaps the journey is as important as the destination after all. It’s like skipping to the last level of a video game before you’ve learned all the controls, or watching the series finale of a show you’ve never seen.
Something about the experience is lost along the way. The reason the game is fun is in the discovery of the things your avatar is capable of doing. That TV show is popular precisely because of the complex relational dynamics the characters have shared over the 6-season arc. To jump straight to the punchline is to miss out on the meaning of it all.
Deconstruction is a journey, but when we make it the destination--just a demolition--we lose the path. We lose our foundation. There are no hints towards a next direction, and there is no meaning.
I say all this to remind myself of what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained.
I've been on this roller coaster yo-yo of a faith journey for what, seven years now? And at the beginning, it's true: there was new life paving over the old. And it was painful and difficult and confusing and uncomfortable and lonely, but also exhilarating and transforming and life-giving and necessary. This was discipleship, this was Jesus-focused and Jesus-inspired, this was good.
I reached equilibrium at some point along the way, though, and when I graduated college, I immediately began to flatline. I was no longer surrounded by friends and advisers I trusted. In fact, it was clearly evident that I was on an entirely different plane than everyone at the Christian organization I found myself working for. Not because they were bad people or because I was somehow “better” than them, but because they hadn't been forced to confront the same elephants I had. They had never had a reason to question their containers, much less felt a need to enlarge them.
As a result, the definition of Christianity I was forced to fit into felt very narrow.
Very quickly, everything became stagnant, and then my life began to implode upon itself. This no longer felt like deconstruction; this was deconversion.
I ran away to find community at a yellow house in Louisiana, and that worked for a while. It halted my downward spiral, and I was able to catch glimpses of truth again. But instead of rebuilding my elephant house (because look how much good that did me before), I focused on tearing apart those things that I knew were wrong, vindicating myself and clinging to my “right” beliefs. It was pure survival instinct, and I played the victim well.
But the point of deconstruction is--and has always been--transformation. And we must be ready to ask ourselves the question: “Have I been truly transformed by this process?”
Because to follow Jesus is to deconstruct, is to be transformed; he spent a large portion of his time deconstructing the dominant Jewish religion of his day, revealing to them all the ways that their containers were too small, all of the ways their traditions were missing the point, all the ways their lifestyles fell short of the Way that God intended. And there are many of us today who need to seriously evaluate our understanding of the Christian faith to see if it lines up with the full reality of Who God Is and what kind of world He intended us to create.
Have we let ourselves be transformed by the renewing (the renovating, the rebuilding, the reconstructing) of our mind? Or will we let ourselves conform to the patterns of this world, the things that are stagnant and dead and in need of resurrection? (Romans 12:2)
Deconstruction is a necessary and critical step on our faith journey, but it is also one that cannot be forced or rushed. And when we’re in it, we must commit to it wholeheartedly, clinging to the hope of new life on the other side. If you’re in the midst of it, I pray that you find peace. If you’ve been through it, I pray that you find ways to encourage those within it. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I pray for an elephant to come wreck your beautifully tiny house of cards.
Because you might just experience Jesus for the first time.
Now, some of this remodeling work was intentional, a choice to nitpick certain viewpoints or teachings in pursuit of a truth they might otherwise have been obstructing. Some of it was purely cynicism that had metastasized into something more. But much of it was simply a river I found that I had fallen into; an inexorable pull by something deeper and greater than me. The process was acted upon me by an outside presence; I didn’t bring that elephant in on my own, after all--that barged onto the scene like Leonardo DiCaprio’s train in Inception (#spoileralert). And once I was forced to relocate that first card, a whole deck of cards came tumbling to the ground after it. Once I took out one wall, the rest of the house crashed down hard.
That was what deconstruction was like for me.
But in the process, there was always a rebirth happening. Things fell down to make way for a new understanding of life. I had to get rid of the old because I was encountering something new. (The Jesus Way is all about resurrection, after all.) It was like someone had given me that elephant as a gift, so I had to create an entire garden for it to live in. Those walls that were getting torn down were being replaced by sitting rooms full of grace. That bedside cabinet was now a library full of contextual knowledge and subtle nuances to my faith.
The destruction had a purpose, and everything that tasted death was given new life again. It was painful and difficult and confusing and uncomfortable and lonely, but also exhilarating and transforming and life-giving and necessary. This was discipleship, this was Jesus-focused and Jesus-inspired, this was good.
But...that's not how people understand deconstruction today.
Now it's just a demolition.
It's cool, it's trendy, and maybe the people who haven't gone through the need for a real deconstruction have mislabeled something they have experienced as a replacement for the dark night of the soul so that they can feel hip and relevant. (I don't know.)
But what's happened now that “deconstruction” is a buzzword is that there are a bunch of pseudo-enlightened young people who take gleeful pleasure in ripping apart old doctrine just for the sake of watching it burn. There's nothing new or better or bigger taking its place; there’s no elephant standing in the living room. But they watched someone else do it on HGTV once (or they listened to an edgy millennial Christian podcast where someone dropped an F-bomb and said that God might be a woman) and now they think their house needs it, too, when they have neither the skills nor the preparation to do so.
And yes. They're absolutely right. There are many ideas that have run their course and have no more part to play in human history. They should be abandoned, and rightly so. And there are other ideas that we need to hurry up and start adopting.
But I wonder if maybe there are stepping stones on this path; if maybe too many people are trying to make their home in a container that is way too big for their current worldview. If they're somehow skipping part of the path; if perhaps the journey is as important as the destination after all. It’s like skipping to the last level of a video game before you’ve learned all the controls, or watching the series finale of a show you’ve never seen.
Something about the experience is lost along the way. The reason the game is fun is in the discovery of the things your avatar is capable of doing. That TV show is popular precisely because of the complex relational dynamics the characters have shared over the 6-season arc. To jump straight to the punchline is to miss out on the meaning of it all.
Deconstruction is a journey, but when we make it the destination--just a demolition--we lose the path. We lose our foundation. There are no hints towards a next direction, and there is no meaning.
I say all this to remind myself of what I’ve lost and what I’ve gained.
I've been on this roller coaster yo-yo of a faith journey for what, seven years now? And at the beginning, it's true: there was new life paving over the old. And it was painful and difficult and confusing and uncomfortable and lonely, but also exhilarating and transforming and life-giving and necessary. This was discipleship, this was Jesus-focused and Jesus-inspired, this was good.
I reached equilibrium at some point along the way, though, and when I graduated college, I immediately began to flatline. I was no longer surrounded by friends and advisers I trusted. In fact, it was clearly evident that I was on an entirely different plane than everyone at the Christian organization I found myself working for. Not because they were bad people or because I was somehow “better” than them, but because they hadn't been forced to confront the same elephants I had. They had never had a reason to question their containers, much less felt a need to enlarge them.
As a result, the definition of Christianity I was forced to fit into felt very narrow.
Very quickly, everything became stagnant, and then my life began to implode upon itself. This no longer felt like deconstruction; this was deconversion.
I ran away to find community at a yellow house in Louisiana, and that worked for a while. It halted my downward spiral, and I was able to catch glimpses of truth again. But instead of rebuilding my elephant house (because look how much good that did me before), I focused on tearing apart those things that I knew were wrong, vindicating myself and clinging to my “right” beliefs. It was pure survival instinct, and I played the victim well.
But the point of deconstruction is--and has always been--transformation. And we must be ready to ask ourselves the question: “Have I been truly transformed by this process?”
Because to follow Jesus is to deconstruct, is to be transformed; he spent a large portion of his time deconstructing the dominant Jewish religion of his day, revealing to them all the ways that their containers were too small, all of the ways their traditions were missing the point, all the ways their lifestyles fell short of the Way that God intended. And there are many of us today who need to seriously evaluate our understanding of the Christian faith to see if it lines up with the full reality of Who God Is and what kind of world He intended us to create.
Have we let ourselves be transformed by the renewing (the renovating, the rebuilding, the reconstructing) of our mind? Or will we let ourselves conform to the patterns of this world, the things that are stagnant and dead and in need of resurrection? (Romans 12:2)
Deconstruction is a necessary and critical step on our faith journey, but it is also one that cannot be forced or rushed. And when we’re in it, we must commit to it wholeheartedly, clinging to the hope of new life on the other side. If you’re in the midst of it, I pray that you find peace. If you’ve been through it, I pray that you find ways to encourage those within it. And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I pray for an elephant to come wreck your beautifully tiny house of cards.
Because you might just experience Jesus for the first time.
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