Part 7: The Wall and its Doorway

Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown.
— Alan Watts

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… 
— W.B. Yeats

“Have you ever seen the Truman Show?” I asked my therapist.

I was desperate to find someway to describe what it felt like.

Desperate to describe the experience of what happened to me that day.

The day I sailed to the edge of my world and discovered its true nature.

In the movie, Truman Burbank is a man who was born into a seemingly ordinary world and grew up living a seemingly ordinary life. Unbeknownst to him, however, he is the main character of a reality TV program called The Truman Show, and everyone in his world is a paid actor. 

As time goes on, he begins to notice certain inconsistencies in his world.

Glitches in the fabric of the TV-program-constructed artificial reality he had always known.

He begins to question things, to become suspicious, to gradually test his doubts.

In the final scene of the movie, Truman faces his extreme phobia of water that had previously prevented him from leaving his manufactured island, and gets on a sailboat and literally sails to the edge of his world, the edge of everything he knows.

His sailboat eventually runs into a wall.

It’s the wall of the dome that was constructed to contain him and his manufactured world for the TV production.

The wall was painted blue with clouds to artificially depict the sky, an illusion of the expansiveness of his world and his freedom within it.

He stumbles out of the boat and disbelievingly places his hands on the wall built to contain him.

Confronted with the horrifying realization and the ultimate confirmation that his life was not what it seemed, not what he had always been convinced it was.

He slowly walks alongside the wall, disbelievingly dragging his hand along it, pensively curious, until he encounters a staircase.

He walks up the staircase and finds a door.

On the door, it reads in large, unmistakable letters: EXIT.

He shoves the door, and it opens — revealing a dark passageway into the unknown.

There, he stands on the precipice.

Everything he thought he knew behind him, on the threshold of the truth, of the unknown, of the mystery.

Would he have the courage to step across the threshold?

To forsake what he had always known for the truth?

My classes all operated more or less the same.

You spend the first few months doing lots of reading and attending weekly lectures.

You get very well acquainted with the subject matter of the course, surveying a large and diverse swath of ideas relevant to each course’s topic.

Sometimes you have small assignments here and there, like writing a summary of a book or article, but generally, your grade in the course exclusively hinges upon a large research paper due at the end of the term.

I was in three classes, so I had three research papers to write.

I saw the papers as the opportunity to literally ask some of the very questions I came to the Netherlands with.

In this way, they were really just personal research projects disguised as academic ones.

I also saw them as a means to share my learnings with my friends, family, and community. So, I wrote my papers with the intention that they would be read, with the intention that I could perhaps not only clarify my own understanding of things but also help others clarify theirs, too.

My approach to them was simple: I wanted the truth more than I wanted to be “right.”

I was not here to defend what I had always believed — nor was I here to abandon it altogether.

I was here to, as honestly and as carefully as I could, interrogate what I believed and to follow where truth led.

And so I got to work.

And just like Truman, I sailed to the edge of my world.

For my spirituality and mysticism in the modern age class, I wrote a comparative paper on mysticism and fundamentalism as two different expressions of Christian faith in the modern age. I explored their differences as two unique pursuits of the same Christian God and reflected on the tenability and implications of their respective approaches to faith.

For my seminar on Christian Spirituality course, I decided to explore the connection between Religious Disillusionment and Spiritual Awakening by evaluating the current “Deconstruction Movement” within American Evangelicalism. My aim was to locate the movement in its historical, social, and theological contexts while examining how the spiritual experiences of those leaving evangelicalism resembled St. John of the Cross' "Dark Night of the Soul." I also considered the implications of these similarities. Perhaps, I wondered, deconstruction wasn’t the evil, demonized process fundamentalists portrayed it to be but rather a doorway to deeper intimacy with the Divine and a more clarified faith.

And then there was my theological ethics paper. 

I did not have to think long about it; the topic for my research paper was immediately obvious from the very beginning of the course: LGBT people and Christian ethics.

I had spent years reading books about faith and sexuality, but most people, on either side of the divide, often only write in such a way that theologically reinforces the ethical conclusion they already hold. Or they go to great lengths to discount the ethical conclusions of their opposition.

I had not encountered any kind of ethical discussion on sexuality that seemed to step outside of its own view, even if temporarily, to compare it, as objectively as possible, with other frameworks and their respective conclusions.

Here was my opportunity to offer something new — my opportunity to write the paper I had long wished someone else had written for me to read.

Every day as I went to the library, I was not researching some casual curiosity to get a passing grade; rather, I was toying with the very fabric of my constructed reality.

And it was as intense as it sounds.

Truthfully, I probably seemed crazy.

Raghu caught me more than once talking to myself at home.

I regularly spent 10-hour days in the library.

Devouring books and articles and academic summarizations.

Writing in fits and sprints.

Some days, I forgot to shower or eat.

Some nights, I would dream about my papers or unwelcomely awaken with some intrusive connection or implication or idea.

My papers haunted me because what was on the line was far more than just a grade, but my very life.

In more ways than one, my future hung in the conclusions of my papers.

A life of singleness and celibacy.

A life of ministry.

Or perhaps a life I hadn’t even let myself conceptualize yet.

With every word I wrote, I got closer to a future I didn’t know.

And then it happened.

The rupture.

My sailboat rammed into a wall, a wall I didn’t want to believe was there but couldn’t deny it didn’t.

I found the wall somewhere near the end of my papers, as I was forced to draw rational, balanced, and well-reasoned conclusions for the academic institution to which I was submitting them.

Neutrality, impartiality, and indifference do not fulfill academic requirements after all. I had to draw definitive, well-reasoned conclusions from my research and observations.

With my paper on the Evangelical Deconstruction movement, I was forced to confront the disquieting reality that the variant of Christian faith I had inherited had an altogether different quality than I always supposed it had.

With my paper on ethics, I was forced to confront the reality that the very ethical framework I had inherited and had based my whole life upon was, on a comparative basis, not as tenable or viable, or logically convincing as other ethical frameworks I had discovered within Christianity. At the very least, it was not as unassailable as I had always assumed it to be.

With my paper on modernity and mysticism, I was confronted with the reality that if any Christian faith in the modern era had any chance at being faithful, fruitful, and founded, it was in its mystical forms rather than its fundamentalist ones.

Such conclusions led me to the third thing I learned in grad school: Fundamentalism was as logically untenable as it was practically troublesome.

Sure, this, in principle, might not have been groundbreaking news in and of itself. Indeed, I had already held fundamentalism with much suspicion and caution for much of my life, so even for me, this was more a confirmation of what I had already intuited than it was a brand-new idea.

That said, what was new were the implications of what this meant for me personally as a recently self-identified fundamentalist.

The implication was: should I wish to maintain both my intellectual honesty as well as my Christian faith, then I could not maintain the fundamentalist form of faith I had inherited and had devoted my entire life to.

Coming to this conclusion was nothing short of profoundly disorienting and crisis-inducing.

I remember my mind racing as I reviewed all my previous life and religious experiences through a more clarified theological lens.

What did it mean that my 13-year-old self declared a violent decade-long war upon himself fueled by an ethical framework I now realized was, at the very least, questionable, if not entirely erroneous?

I had long told myself that the violence I inflicted and subjected myself to all those many years was, at the very least, virtuous.

That God was going to use the suffering of my self-estrangement for “my good and his Glory.”

That my emotional mutilation was at least accomplishing my spiritual sanctification.

That my pain was purposeful.

Running into that wall meant that the meaning that shouldered the years of suffering suddenly fell out from underneath it.

I would not wish this experience onto anyone.

To suddenly lose the meaning of your own suffering is to be thrust into such a nauseating disorientation that you somehow fear your body cannot contain the unmitigated and unrelenting grief, despair, anger, and hopelessness that seems to abruptly surge forcibly within you.

The implications related to my suffering were calamitous and destabilizing enough on their own; this was not to mention the sudden awareness that nearly all my life decisions I had ever made, from what I studied in school, my financial decisions, my relationships, and the use of my time and energy ever since I was a child were more or less informed by a worldview I had now plainly concluded to be both untenable and precarious.

What I was left with was panic, pain, anger, grief, and a profound disillusionment.

My world shattered, and I suffered the searing loss that came from the realization that there was no going back.

I remember where I was.

I was sitting at my desk at my flat, working on one of my paper’s conclusions.

The sun was pouring through my desk-side window, illuminating my space with light and warmth from the rising summer sun.

My vision narrowed, and my throat closed.

I felt like the world around me was crumbling.

I grabbed my keys and ran for my bike downstairs.

I had to get out.

I had to get air.

I felt like I was suffocating.

I biked to Goffert Park, to that one spot, under a canopy of trees, that I so liked to go where few people ever were.

Once there, I hurled my body and my bike onto the grass.

I took my shoes off.

And then my socks.

I placed my bare hands and feet on the grass - desperate to feel grounded despite it feeling like the ground was falling out from underneath me.

Exhausted and invigorated, I didn’t know how to be in my body. It felt like I was both expanding and yet imploding all at once.

I remember I felt afraid, somatically unsafe, unsure if I could even contain this newfound grief within the borders of my body.

Do I cry or yell or lay in silence?

What was I feeling? Trying to wrap it in language felt like trying to put scaffolding around a black hole.

It was chaos, whatever it was.

“It feels like the Truman Show” I told my therapist later.

“Like everything I believed to be true about myself and my world is not what I always thought it was.”

I could not unsee the wall.

There was no going back, even if I wanted to.

And a part of me wanted to; a part of me desperately wanted things to stay the same.

But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t go back.

To try and go back would be to betray myself.

To betray my own intellectual honesty.

To knowingly re-subjugate myself to my own captivity.

Just like Truman, liberation came as a crisis.

Like him, standing in his profound disillusionment, I stood on the threshold of a passageway into the unknown.

Like him, I had no other option but to step over the threshold to make my exit through that door.

No matter how hesitantly, I had to discover whatever may lay on the other side.

This Post's Song: Lux Aeterna, by Clint Mansel and Kronos Quartet

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Read the next part:

Part 8: The Beauty and the Between

No one can heal by maintaining or fostering illusion. — Alice Miller It’s in the darkness, it’s in the moment of crisis when you have fallen through all of your own expectations that there is the opportunity for rebirthing. — Barbara A. Holmes I profess the uncertain with gratitude. … the

Yielding to YesTim Jurgensen