Deconstruction is a lot like chemo-therapy or radiation therapy, in that it can cure you of cancer and give you a new lease on life. But it can also kill you. Too much chemo or too much radiation is as dangerous as the cancer. That’s not a perfect analogy but it’s close to what I mean. Deconstruction is a wonderful thing, a healing and a liberating thing, but if taken too far it can easily rob you of any sense of spiritual vitality or any sense of connection to something transcendent, sacred, or divine. It can leave you feeling like a hollow shell of your former self.
The solution is to construct new stories that work for us and others. Or the solution is to take some of the old stories (i.e., from the Bible) and make them work because there’s so much about them that is meaningful, liberating, and life-giving. One does not need to read them literally to find them meaningful or true.
When we’re reading a novel, we don’t have to keep reminding ourselves that we’re reading fiction, right? No, we’re just going with the story, and that allows us to be totally open and moved by it, maybe even moved to tears because what’s happening to us is real, because the story is real.
A story becomes real not when we’ve convinced ourselves that we’re no longer reading fiction, but a story becomes real when it becomes meaningful to us. Stories are magical things. Stories shape us. Stories shape the world. Why shouldn’t we think of that as magical? Why shouldn’t we think of storytelling as casting spells? This is especially true of our sacred stories. These stories have immense power. They are powerful technologies of collective and self-transformation. They are meaning-making systems. Let’s not lose sight of that.
And who knows, maybe our sacred stories point to some metaphysical or transcendental reality that is rightly approximated in words like, God, or the Divine, or the Source, or the One, or Brahman, or the Great Spirit. Perhaps the reason why every culture since the dawn of humanity contains such stories is because we are intuitively aware of the transcendent. As conscious and transcendent beings ourselves, maybe we recognize transcendence when we see it and that’s why we tell these stories and have these traditions – they’re all ways of speaking of this deeper reality that we are intuitively aware of. I don’t know, but I do know we shouldn’t give up on our sacred stories.
Let’s not deconstruct so much that we just throw them out and with them, any sense of spiritual vitality. I think that would be really tragic. Instead, let’s embrace the stories that work for us, discard those that don’t, and create new stories that can function as technologies of collective and self-transformation.
I think this is precisely how many of us in deconstruction must believe now. In other words, we know the Bible is largely mythological and that all religions are human constructs, but we believe something about it works anyway. Thus, our unbelief actually allows us to really believe, or believe on a deeper level.
This is the dance between belief and unbelief. There is an interplay and harmony between these things that are seemingly contradictory like: atheism and theism, belief and unbelief, deconstruction and reconstruction, chaos and order, etc. These things are actually deeply related and dependent upon each other. They’re just two sides of the same coin. Such an understanding bypasses the conscious mind and unleashes the power of the unconscious.
For those who are still confused by this idea of believing in things we also know are fictional (and who could blame you), I think it helps to know that we’re already doing this all the time anyway, because we live in an entirely fictional world. By that I don’t mean we’re living in an artificial simulation like the Matrix. Rather, our concept of identity and self is entirely fictional and constructed. Think about it: what does it mean to be white or black? What does it mean to be straight or gay? Masculine or feminine? What does it mean to be an American or a Russian? Conservative or a liberal? Christian or Buddhist? Theist or atheist? What does it mean to be human?
We think of these monolithic identity markers as being grounded in something more real and true, other than just stories people came up with, but that’s really all they are. They’re just stories that became culturally agreed upon as meaningful and true. I’m not saying that they’re meaningless, untrue, or irrelevant. Rather quite the opposite. They absolutely are meaningful, true, and relevant. But they are products of human imagination nonetheless. They are fictions. They are stories we create to give our world structure, our lives meaning, and to help us navigate life. So, we’re already immersed in a fictional world to begin with. We already believe in all these made-up things. Why not embrace the wonderful and meaningful stories of our spiritual traditions too, and allow them to speak to us and transform us in positive ways?