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 Holmes

I profess the uncertain
with gratitude.
… the almost untenable premise
that between counting one and two
nothing is lost.
— Jane Hirschfeld

I sat on a train, it’s windows wide and panoramic.

I remember thinking it felt like some kind of portal into some expansive mountainous world.

The sheer beauty of the landscape hurling past my window was unlike anything I had really ever seen or experienced, and my location at that moment was as unrecognizable to me as my own reflection in the window.

It was summer break, and I was in Norway visiting some longtime family friends.

After a few days with them at their home in Oslo, I was venturing out on my own.

I was headed northwest, toward the city of Bergen.

Just me and my disillusionment on that seven-hour train ride across the Norwegian mountains.

Similar to when I arrived in the Netherlands, I found myself again in liminal space. 

I was not yet where I was headed, nor was I any longer where I had come from—I was somewhere precisely in-between. 

There was a strange and necessary beauty to the place “between,” I reflected.

Not just literally as I stared out my window at the beautiful landscape rushing by, observing the necessary passage of time and place found in the precise in-between place of my origin and my destination — but so too, I realized, the same was true for my spiritual position.

Richard Rohr, the well-known Christian contemplative and spiritual author, describes the spiritual development process as having three stages: order, disorder, and reorder.

He says:

To continue growing, we must go through a period—or even many periods —of Disorder. The pattern of transformation involves at least some measure of suffering. Part of us has to die if we are ever to grow larger (John 12:24). If we’re not willing to let go of our smaller selves, our norms, beliefs, and preferences, we won’t be able to enter the more expansive and inclusive space of Reorder. ^[1]

This was my summer of disorder.

My papers were finished.

I had survived my first semester of grad school.

A summary of what I had learned and deconstructed:

1. I knew way less than I thought I did.
2. The faith I had inherited was categorically fundamentalist, much to my honest surprise.
3. If any kind of (Christian) faith was tenable, fruitful, and faithful in modernity, I was certain it was not fundamentalist in nature.
4. Therefore: If I was going to maintain both my intellectual honesty and my Christian faith, then I could not continue practicing the faith I had inherited and devoted my entire life to.

My disorder was: What now? What does this mean? Where do I go from here?

To be honest, this was more than I had bargained for.

At the start, I simply set out on this journey to clarify my commitment to my faith and better understand the place of my queerness in it all. I never expected or planned to be entirely thrust outside of the worldview I had always held.

Yet, here I was, sitting on this train, headed to Bergen, a very different person than the one who had arrived in Europe seven months prior.

I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say that the temptation to let myself become cynical and embittered was real and very compelling. The pain of my disillusionment at times felt blinding and all-encompassing; I felt deeply betrayed that I had somehow been indoctrinated into such self-hatred and violence and now was left with wounds I didn’t even know how to begin to heal.

I wonder if one of the hardest things about being disillusioned is that - to be disillusioned - one has first to accept or acknowledge they were ever "illusion-ed" to begin with. This may feel like you had been deceived or misled by others - or perhaps, most significantly, by yourself.

And so maybe there is some measure of shame in it all, too. We may suddenly feel naive or foolish to think with such certainty that the world, or people, or ourselves were one way — only to find out they were, in fact, something quite different. It's humbling to have our illusions about the world suddenly break down, at its worst it can be incredibly painful, disorienting, and traumatizing.

My self-compassion allowed me to acknowledge that the impulse toward cynicism was perhaps the most natural or normal response. But somehow, there was still some small part of myself, maybe just somewhere deep down, that believed that truth doesn't liberate us only to imprison us again - only this time to cynicism.

Sure, cynicism may seem to shield me from the grief of my present pain or protect me from the pain of any future disappointment —but so too would it rob my life of wonder, and joy, and beauty.

I believed Truth to be inherently good, even if painfully inconvenient. And so I was desperate to believe that there was still good to be found amid the newfound Truth, that there was still beauty to be uncovered even amid the grief and anger and abject floundering I was experiencing.

I wrote in my journal that day:

I feel like my world is shaking and falling all around me. As I sit today in an overwhelming surge of horror, fear, confusion and numbness, I must believe that the best is still yet to come, that there is good ahead, good in store.

I remember taking comfort in the words of Rohr in that the “disorder,” even while it comes with its measure of suffering, can serve to accomplish something.

Rohr speaks about this in terms of "liminality," the essential threshold between our former reality and our new one.

He writes:

We have to allow ourselves to be drawn into sacred space, into liminality. All transformation takes place here. There alone is our old world left behind, though we’re not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin. We must get there often and stay as long as we can by whatever means possible. It’s the realm where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.^[2]

As the train journeyed through the windy mountain passes and each new curve revealed new terrain and striking horizons — I sensed that just as my old world had fallen apart, simultaneously, a new world was being revealed to me.

Surprised, I somehow discovered within myself, despite my anger and grief, a hopeful and creative impulse to discover more of this new world — and I wondered if this was the place God had been trying to get me to all along.

From where I stand now, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities in life is not seeing our disillusionment as the gift and opportunity that it really is.

By definition, in losing an illusion, we are given the opportunity to gain more of reality —to discover more fully what is actually real and true.

Do we really want the alternative?

Do we really want to maintain an illusion just for the sake of our own comfort or convenience?

Disillusionment, no matter how painful, empowers one to live increasingly into reality, to discern better what is true and what is not, to see the nature of truth clearer.

Rohr speaks to this when he said:

It’s no surprise then that we generally avoid liminal space. Much of the work of authentic spirituality and human development is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there long enough that they can learn something essential and new…. This in-between place is free of illusions and false payoffs. It invites us to discover and live from broader perspectives and with much deeper seeing.^[3]

For the first time, I felt like I could see clearly without the blindness of my false illusions or my fearful grasp at certitude.

The only question was: could I receive it as the gift it was?

Would I allow my disillusionment to serve a creative function — or a destructive one?

Could I linger in the liminality long enough to learn what it was teaching me?

Perhaps this was my opportunity to understand what Rumi meant when he said: “pain would arise from looking within, and that pain would save him.”

Would my pain save me or destroy me?

As I stared out the window and the landscape hurling past me, I considered how to continue from here.

I had rejected the faith I had inherited, namely its fundamentalist nature.

But I had not necessarily rejected Christianity.

Was there something salvageable? Something to re-construct?

In Rohr’s words, was there some kind of “reorder” still before me?

This was the new invitation before me.

I took comfort in knowing I was not the first to walk this path.

Dr. David Gushee, for example, a leading Christian Ethicist and former fundamentalist himself, beckoned me to the work of reorder when he said:

Rather than simply lamenting our losses and critiquing evangelicalism, it seems important to try to articulate a more faithful version of faith. This is the post-evangelical task.^[4]

On that train to Bergen, I realized this was far from the end of my journey.

No matter how valid my grief and anger were, my work was not simply to self-pity and wallow in the pain of my shattered assumptions but to seek to articulate something more truthful than certain.

My work was to learn how to “profess the uncertain with gratitude.”

This Post's Song: Between Two Worlds, by Beyond the Lens

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Read the next part:

Part 9: From the Moral to the Mystical

The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all. ― Karl Rahner For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required. – Henri Nouwen Somewhere beyond right and wrong, there is a garden. I will

Yielding to YesTim Jurgensen