Experimenting this week with an audio recording of this issue…let me know what you think.
Welcome to Creative\\Proofing, a space for hopeful, creative people learning to live wisely by asking questions about the good life: what it is, how to design our own, and how to live it well.
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Establishing Bona Fides
I’ve grown up within American Christianity for the last forty-plus years, first within a subset of fundamentalism, then conservative evangelicalism by way of non-denominationalism. (That’s a lot of -isms.) I have many friends and family members who work in ministry, as pastors, para-church leaders, missionaries. I attended seminary, have worked at two seminaries, and also worked for a large mega-church in an urban metro area, all while attending various churches in multiple cities, states, and denominations, and finally, attending no church at all.
I’ve spent most of my adult life navigating the intersection of theology, culture, and daily life, whether at work, in relationships, in decisions. After recently leaving twelve years of being and working in evangelical higher education, I now find myself at one of those natural inflection points that marks transition, reflection, and hopefully, closure.
I share this mini biography to establish my deep familiarity with, and formation by, American evangelical Christianity. Like many others with a similar story, I’ve watched with horror, shame, and grief over the last few years as the very public actions by many evangelical leaders demonstrated deeper changes much closer to home that I hadn’t fully comprehended before.
I’ve listened as friends and acquaintances share their stories of wrestling, deconstructing, and often, leaving their evangelical churches, communities, and families for a variety of understandable reasons. I’m not the only one who feels lost, homeless, and unmoored after saying goodbye to what was, quite literally, an entire life.
And part of that homelessness lies in the fact that, for me and many others, leaving the worst of evangelicalism has also meant leaving a great deal of its best. I grew up knowing that I belonged to a community, to a tightly-knit family that knew my entire history beginning with my parents’ first date. I grew up rebelling against the strict dogmas of a specific church, against its do’s and don’ts, while always sensing on some level that I had to take seriously the Person and the truths at the heart of the religion itself.
It’s always the outliers that make the news, that fuel the gossip and shape the stories. It’s rare that we hear about the generous, gracious faithful who behave with integrity, who manifest the goodness that we all long to savor.
We lose a lot in the leaving.
Feeling Like That Pixar Movie
A friend of mine often says that we don’t fear change so much as we fear, or are upset by, loss. We like change as long as it works in our favor, brings good things or people into our orbit. But when change takes things, when it carves comfort or stability or status out of our lives, that’s what we have a hard time dealing with. And with the reality of loss open deep reservoirs of anger and disappointment, feelings which neither American culture nor American evangelicalism particularly equip us to face with courage.
The last twelve-plus years of deconstruction, of finally leaving my job, of taking that last step out of the American evangelical world, it’s a change and it’s a loss, even when it’s also a relief. It’s a mixed bag, is what I’m saying. I have spent a lot of that time fueled by anger: sometimes white-hot at the latest injustice; sometimes disgusted by the same song, new verse; but lately, simply exhausted at the revolving cast of characters telling a depressingly familiar story of corruption, failure, and unredeemed humanity.
I’m still learning what to do with this anger, even just recognizing it in myself at all. Poet David Whyte calls anger
the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt.1
I’ve only ever understood anger as a destructive, harmful emotion, like fire, indiscriminately consuming everything in its wake. But Whyte’s words point toward another truth: also like fire, anger can illuminate the hidden things, can make visible the difference between what is and what could be. Anger shows you what matters. Because you don’t get upset by things you don’t care about.
What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.2
And that’s the hardest thing about leaving evangelicalism: I see what it is, and it breaks my heart, because I know it’s so far short of what it could be, what it’s called to be. It feels like I spent most of my adult life in the evangelical sphere trying to point toward and share what could be with others, only to find that they were mostly satisfied with things as-is. And I felt powerless to continue trying.
What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our minds with the clarity and breadth of our being.3
But anger, like fire, eventually burns itself out. I’m not deluding myself that, in leaving, I’ll find a more perfect religion or a better community; that doesn’t exist on this side of eternity. I’m leaving because I’m tired, and wounded, and done with that particular struggle. But mostly, I’m leaving because I’m disappointed. And it’s time to take the advice of the man in black. (No, not that one, the other one.)
Get Used to Disappointment
You’d think that, after spending my entire life in this particular world, I would have long ago reached the end of my capacity for disappointment. I’m a little surprised that I’m surprised, honestly. It’s as though cutting that last tie to evangelicalism finally left me free to acknowledge All the Things (TM) without attempting to maintain some sense of loyalty to a community or institution. It’s left me with little else to do but actually reckon with the difference between what was and is, what I hoped it would be, and the fact that I still hope at all.
Again, Whyte offers some words that I’ve been sitting with lately, wrestling with my own contributions to the slow event and experience of loss.
To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves, in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.4
Over and over in my adult life, as I’ve chosen to commit to the Person and the kingdom of God, I entered evangelical spaces with the assumption, the hope, that we all took seriously the reality of the kingdom of God in this world, and the responsibilities of participating honestly and hopefully in that reality.
Would I carry such disappointment had I accepted sooner the evangelical world as it is? As a flawed expression of deeper realities that simultaneously manages to be more, less, and other than what it’s called to be? When I took my first step out of that world, years ago, I did so in anger, in repudiation, with a conviction that I could find or create a better world elsewhere. Over my long walk, I’ve learned to temper that conviction, to realize that there’s no elsewhere that I can create, only the here and now to make something of, as well as I can.
Would I carry such disappointment had I grappled sooner with the reality that there exists no beloved community in time or space that has ever consistently, genuinely lived up to the call to be Christ’s friends, to love one another? We’ve seen glimpses, we’ve caught echoes, we’ve tasted moments that come close. And it’s the realization of such fleeting moments that cause the most heartbreak: we’re shown what is good, what is required of us, and we misinterpret, misunderstand, misbehave. I damn myself with this disappointment, too, knowing that I’ve also failed to make better what my anger made visible.
Domine, quo vadis?
There’s an Italian Baroque painting by Carracci, of the apostle Peter meeting the resurrected Christ carrying his cross. The title of the painting captures this moment, of Peter asking, “but Lord, where are you going?” Christ answers, “to Rome, to be crucified again.” Peter, reminded yet again of his own faithlessness and of Christ’s faithfulness, turns back to Rome, cultivating the church and eventually meeting his own martyrdom.
Baroque art isn’t a period I spend a lot of time with, but there’s something about the tension of this scene, of these two figures suspended in this moment of action and reaction. Peter’s posture all but quivers with fear, with flight, with disappointment in his own incapacity to live truly into the reality made possible by this Christ. Jesus’ posture, by contrast, conveys a fluid openness to the path before him, an energetic readiness to meet death yet again, for the sake of his people, for the sake of this one man next to him.
The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.5
Whyte’s words open up this painting, this question — where now, Lord? where are you going? — showing me the courage of Christ, his willingness to endlessly embrace disappointment in this world, to endure a broken heart in the wake of betrayal, and yet to pursue the only path of real ground available to him. The other, unspoken question quivering between Peter and Christ — where am I going, Lord? — is also mine in the aftermath of loss, in the ashes of anger, in the ruins of disappointment.
For myself, and so many I know, we’ve done a lot of deconstruction in our lives, calling out patterns of dishonesty and carelessness, breaking down harmful structures and dogmas that left us wounded and twitchy. Deconstruction, dismantling former certainties, upending tables: such work is important to starting a new journey, to moving forward effectively. It should generate anger and disappointment in us; we should grieve the hurt we’ve endured.
And it takes as long as it takes to work through our change, loss, anger, disappointment, grief. It takes as long as it takes to extend the generosity, the compassion, the understanding and clarity that we wanted to receive, that is required for forgiving the people and actions that caused us pain. It takes as long as it takes.
Where am I going?
Taking that question seriously right now asks me to embrace my disappointment, the betrayal of a reality I thought was one way that turns out to be another. It asks me to meet the real ground beneath my feet as an invitation: to reconstruct, to repair, to remain awake to the ways in which the kingdom of God continues to move through the world, and continues inviting us to participate anew.
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience6. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.7
Let’s be hopeful, creative, and wise — together.
Shalom,
Megan.
David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, p. 19.
ibid, p. 20.
ibid, p. 20.
ibid, pp. 73-4.
ibid, p. 74.
Originally typed as “resistance,” and updated 05.05.22 at 7.05pm.
ibid, p. 75.
