Beyond Death: The Deconstruction Movement
“‘He descended into hell...’
And he keeps on going there.
Because we do.
’Even the darkness is light to you...’
So he keeps bringing heaven into the hell you make and the flames you thought would consume become the flames of Pentecost that transform you into something new.”
The fear of death is the final fear. The one which trumps all other fears with its ruthless inevitability.
Perhaps it is because part of my work is to sit in the sacred liminal space between life and death with those who are making this final transition, that I have become so enamoured with it. This is where I sit tonight. Waiting between life and death, holding space for those with the skillful and steady hands ministering deeply into the yawning gap where death waits. I never feel more deeply aligned with my own vocation than when I am called into the place where I am able to invite a front-line healthcare worker to sit with and face their own human limitations and their own mastery side by side. Death is the relentless invitation for these incredible souls. It forces them to hold their utter humanity on the one hand, and their professional skill to keep death at bay on the other. Death sneaks in past all our defenses in the end and has its way with all of us, which can cause moral injury over the long term for those among us called to be healers if we do not dance well with own fear of suffering and death….
Once we have suffered, we no longer fear the suffering of others. Once we have been apprenticed at the knee of Divine about grief and loss, it is returned to us as a soul-tether to hope and meaning.
Once we have walked into the brutal truth that there are things far worse than death, we learn not to fear it anymore.
I wrote another piece once, about how the human creature equates exile with death, because in ancient times, to be exiled from the community was to face certain death. We need each other to survive, it turns out.
On the journey to deconstruct, we must face our fear of dying alone, in exile from our community - one which perhaps conferred to us some semblance of comfort about the death and dying process, one in which we seamlessly shift from life on earth, to life in the eternal embrace of “The Father”. When we deconstruct, we face not only the fear that perhaps life after death might not be real, but also the fear that maybe we are literally cutting ourselves off from those who would hold us in our last moments. This is a gnarly fear indeed, the fear of death, and the one which precedes it; the fear of exile. The two are often linked, I have noticed.
Something else curious I have noticed, is among the many dying folks I have been privileged enough to midwife out of the world, there is a common thread. Those who have known love - deep love, real love, true love, are not afraid of dying. Whilst those who have not, are terrified. I will tell you this for free, love does not toe religious lines. If anything, I have seen more deeply religious folks in desperate fear of dying and more atheist or agnostic or “loosely spiritual” folks embrace death like an old friend. The Christian platitudes about heaven and the ‘sinner’s prayer’ don’t mean shit when the chips are down and someone is facing their last days, hours or minutes.
It turns out.
What matters, it turns out, is love.
Who would have thought.
I sometimes wonder if it is because real love appears to be excellent preparation for death and dying, because it involves a radical embrace of our own powerlessness, and a willingness to surrender to what the body is doing. When I am in the presence of a couple who have loved each other deeply and long, and one of them is preparing to die and the other is doing the impossible work of preparing to let their beloved go, I am unable to mask or hide my own human response to it. Many times I have sat in the quiet sanctity of a hospital room holding wrinkled and gnarled hands and silently let tears slide hot and fast down my cheeks as I bear witness to the gravity of the kind of selfless love which is preparing to allow the other to gracefully die, knowing that they will not be able to slip into death’s embrace until their loved-one willingly releases them to do so. I have watched time and time again and seen how people wait until they have been given permission by their loved ones before finally letting go of life. Even on that precipice, love offers us a choice. I remind my team of something that I model for them here, that Jesus invited us to weep with those who weep. And so I do.
When I am, however, in the presence of a family who holds their religious beliefs stiff and firm as a kind of protective shield against feeling the grief they suspect might swallow them whole, and when fear of what is happening pervades the room, I am calm and cool as a cucumber. When platitudes are being thrown about, or - even worse - I am being asked to provide them, I find the still place within where I know how the words should go, how the body language looks, how to enact the exact kind of ritual that is needed to fulfil what is most suitable and fitting to these folks who have substituted belonging for love, and live in fear of both exile and death, and I just execute them respectfully and hold space for what may emerge as the minutes quietly unfold.
I can tell you which one is the rarer experience, and I’m sure it won’t surprise you.
The deconstruction process forces us to face our own mortality, and re-think our assumptions about how our lives should look and feel, and who should be a part of them.
This Christmas, I was offered another beautiful opportunity to reflect on how I orient myself in relation to those I love, and who is allowed to come in close, and who must now be kept at a distance, for everyone’s sake. I was somewhat surprised to notice, this afternoon as I sat with the woman who has become a Soul-Mother to me in the absence of my biological mother, that linear time has very little to do with anything. Some of the people I have ‘belonged’ to since I was a tiny girl no longer extend invitations to me, or decline mine. Some of the people who are blood or by-marriage relatives to me, have no idea how to be around me, and so avoid me like the plague. These are the people who would have once been key orientation points for me, people who I would have gone to for comfort, or advice, or a laugh, or to plan a holiday, or to ask for support, or to make birthday plans with. And some people I didn’t even know existed 3 years ago have become closer to me than my own flesh-and-blood. The spark of recognition we feel, that deep knowing that we ‘belong’ to each other far more powerfully than our DNA might reflect has meant I have allowed them to step in close to form new family, wrapped right around myself and my children like a protective layer of insulation against the fear of exile and death that I, too, once danced with.
Bonds that break when they are tested for durability were never meant to last the distance. Its the bonds that can’t be broken - through absence, through time, through distance or through sheer force of will, which are Realer than Real, and which inevitably end up being the ones that will teach us about what Love really is.
Leaning into the strength of Real bonds teaches us something that we cannot learn inside the false security of a faith community - which is that there is no such thing as safely belonging to another if we have not first learned how to belong to ourselves.
I have learned that it is often true that those around us are deeply invested in us remaining old versions of ourselves. And when we evolve and change and grow, our new energy can disrupt their expectations, and when our behaviours do not match their expectations, we can expect some form of exile or rejection or both. If I had a dollar for every time a person from my family or my previous church families attempted to bring me to heel by alerting me to the fact that my behaviour had fallen far short of their expectations of me, I would be a rich woman.
I have learned that it is far more dangerous to live in exile to ourselves and remain inside the illusion of belonging to others, than it is to finally decide to live in integrity within our own energy, and belong to ourselves first and let others re-arrange themselves around us as it suits them.
We are only ever responsible for our own energy, we can never be responsible for the energy that others project onto us, or hold in relation to us. I was taught, and perhaps you were too, that in order to belong to a community of faith I had to submit myself to the authority of its leaders and abandon my own inner authority.
This lead me to learn how to repeatedly abandon myself. As a leader, I continued to abandon myself to the leaders who sat above me, and even worse, to model self-abandonment to those I was entrusted to teach and guide.
I was taught, and perhaps you were too, that in order to belong to a community of faith I should rely on the wisdom and discernment of the elders and submit myself to their pronouncements.
This lead me to learn how to ignore my own inner wisdom. And even worse, to teach others to also override their own inner wisdom and trust instead in the external scaffolding that evangelical Christianity had decided was the correct framework.
I was taught, and perhaps you were too, that in order to belong to a community of faith, I should adhere to the shared understanding of how life before and after death should look like, otherwise I might go to hell, and take others with me by my bad example.
This lead me to fear everything. To fear love, to fear suffering, to fear my own energy, to fear abandonment, to fear separation, to fear what might happen if I fucked it all up. I lived with crushing fear for a good long portion of my life, and I now understand how that kept me rooted in place inside my faith community, afraid of exile and afraid of death.
Through deconstruction, I learned first how to sit with my own fear of death. After a while, I learned that my fear of death was not about death. It was about the fear of the powerlessness and loss of control that arises from loving and allowing myself to be really loved. Then I learned, that in order to work through this fear, I first had to stop self-abandoning. And so I removed myself out from under anyone else’s authority for the first time in my life and started tasting how that felt, and I loved it. Refusing to ‘sit under’ someone else’s authority does not fly well in evangelical circles, I discovered. And so I turned to the council of wise people I had around me, and asked the elders I had created for myself to pronounce wisdom on me, to help me navigate this newfound freedom and the discomfort it was generating across a decent swathe of my existing community, including my immediate family members.
But I found that the terrain I had begun to traverse was wild and unexplored by most of the people in my world, and none of my wise elders had anything to offer me at this juncture except for my Doug who said to me, ‘When are you going to wake up and remember who you really are? You do not need what you think you need from me.’ And for the third time in my life, his words formed a tiny little life raft that kept me afloat in the wild ocean of my own energy and I found the courage to step into new mastery. I began to ignore the wisdom I had been handed inside my faith communities, and I returned to the ancient masters, and began to hone my own. I read Gibran and Hafiz, Rumi and Bourgeault. I read Kirkegaard, Merton, Girard and de Porete, Myss and Ohotto, Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. I studied the mandala, and the stars, and discovered sacred geometry. I threw my net wide and apprenticed myself to the universal Source energy which holds all things in perfect alignment. I learned about the beauty of the total annihilation of the self and the ego and practiced that as my new spiritual anchor. I sat in the presence of the Christ Consciousness and began to form and re-form new understandings and patterns of life and living. I re-calibrated my instruments and began to understand that I am not a human having a spiritual experience, I am a soul who exists inside a vast cosmic reality having a human experience, and I began to realize how short it was all going to be and so how important it was that I get on with all the good stuff.
Immediately.
I called my best friend one day in the midst of this new-learning and said ‘I’m doing it! I’m living it! This brand new life I have built for myself, I’m doing it all by myself and it feels so wild and scary and exciting and good.’
And one day, I turned around and realized I was no longer scared of death or dying.
Or of loving or being loved.
Or of abandonment or separation or of fucking it all up.
Deconstruction was the path to the deepest healing I have ever walked into.
Now when people ask me what I believe, or how I define my spirituality, I usually ask them a question in return.
“Why do you want to know?”
Ironically, even though I write in general terms about my spirituality here, I no longer think that what I believe is anyone’s business. Even my most intimate friends would struggle to describe my spiritual lens. They might be able to describe a slice of it, but without the other counterpointed slices, it would sound wonky and strange. It is not: it is utterly coherent, powerful and beautiful, and it is my deepest and most sacred truth which less than a handful of souls scattered across this planet understand. And so I assure you, if you have made assumptions about what I do or don’t believe based on what you may have read here, or on any of my other platforms, you are probably wrong.
In the same way that I would never ask another person who they were sleeping with, I would also not ask them to tell me about their private spiritual beliefs, unless they were paying me to ask, or specifically offered it in the context of a very firm and trusting relational container of safety. Erotic energy and generative spirituality come from the same place inside the soul and so must both be guarded with fierce privacy and treated as sacred and not to be shared with the uninitiated. It is not good spiritual hygiene to give everyone access to your energy or to explain to them how you work with it, in the same way that its not smart to sleep around. The ones who are going to understand it don’t need it explained to them anyway, they are always just going to deeply know it, even if they don’t let on, or if you never really talk about it.
One of my wise teachers during my deconstruction period who provided me with rich and fulsome education around archetypal energies and the way they have played out throughout human history calls this kind of work which I have described here the development of ‘soul esteem’. He would say (and I agree) that many of the experiences we magnetize into our own energy fields, especially the painful ones, are there to catalyze the formation of soul-esteem. Without this deep well of strength at a soulful level, we remain impotent and fearful. We must - at all costs (I believe) - walk away from all external validation (or condemnation) of our soul’s worth in order to fully grasp it for ourselves. This is why I think deconstruction is brilliant news for the world, and for the church.
A whole generation of people are walking away from external reference points offered by faith communities, and developing their own soul-esteem. I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he compared the Kingdom of God to treasure buried in a field. The narrative goes that when the person realizes this, they sell everything they own in order to purchase this field that they might be able to dig for, find and legally take possession of the treasure. Soul-esteem is the treasure which is the germinated seed of the Kingdom of God inside every human heart, and ironically, many of us have to walk away from the scaffolding of the faith community, selling everything we have in order to buy what we need to finally lay hold of it.
The development of soul-integrity or soul-esteem will always deliver us to the other side of the fear of exile and death, where we arrive inside of the vast territory of wonder. Where all things become possible, where nothing is off the table, and where staying safe and playing small and toeing the company line by adhering to group norms fades into the rearview mirror as even more soul-integrity emerges. This is the territory of deep freedom where we discover our own sovereignty which can never be ceded.
Where risk becomes delightful.
Where we can begin to feel safe wherever we are because we learn that we always travel with our own energy.
Where we begin to relax into the powerful truth that the body delivers us into - that this is our ‘one wild and precious life’, to quote Mary Oliver and we may as well run headlong into it and take what is coming to us.
Do not be afraid of the deconstruction, beloveds.
It is the surest path home, turns out.