I’ve been talking in the last months about how I have left Christianity and how it’s affected me. But lately I’ve been thinking about you. You are reading my blogs and many of you have left, are leaving or are questioning and wondering what’s going to happen to you. You and I are not the same. We all do this journey differently. We start for different reasons, leaving takes different amounts of time. We arrive at different places. However, there are some things that may be similar for all or most of us.
I don’t want you to be left empty with nowhere to go to for help. We all need tools to help us survive in life. We got those tools from our faith and now we need to find new ones. Christianity gave us comfort, we believed that God would help us, we had a community that would give to us when we were in need. We had help making decisions, we had prayer to turn to. After deconstructing we may see this all different. If you still believe in God and that he personally guides you, you may have kept some of those tools. If you have a church where you fit, you have a community, but for those who have deconverted those things are not there for you now, and some never actually were there. The first step for me in finding tools was grieving my faith.
I have been studying what it means to grieve our faith. That seems to me to be the best place to start. The first step has been to identify my losses. There are tangible losses I have felt. I have lost my church community, which while totally my choice, still feels like a missing piece. The people of my church were my friends, they loved and supported me. I have been very hesitant to reach out to them. Since I have been very public with my deconversion, I don’t want to threaten their peace. If they reach out to me I am here for them, and I am not trying to change them, but I will tell them what I think if they ask. To those who have reached out, I am so grateful. Since deconversion, I have less meaningful conversations with some family members. We have kept a relationship but it has changed. With others (thanks mom and dad!) we can talk about our differences and still love and respect each other.
I grieve the time I spent serving all those years yet It was meaningful at the time. I grieve at the same time the loss of the hours I could have put into other things. It’s always a mix. For example, going to seminary was the step I needed to learn that there were no satisfying answers to the deep questions that I had. I am grateful for those years. Yet on the other hand, I regret that I didn’t get a degree in counselling or a similar field. I grieve some friends that I can no longer share my heart with as they just don’t understand where I am coming from.
There are abstract losses such as beliefs, meaning and purpose, perceived safety and support, known moral and behavioural norms and faith. There are secondary losses such as holidays no longer having the deeper religious meaning and needing new understanding and traditions. There are also losses not easily recognized or understood. I wonder why, if I have chosen to leave, am I now grieving? There are those who think I am better without faith and church, so why grieve them? I should just join another church, or just repent and go back. It’s complicated. There can be backlash both from Christians and from exChristians who are at a different place in their journey and don’t understand why I am still grieving. Grief is not a choice, it is a result of losing something or someone that was meaningful. The choice is how we deal with grief.
As I continue grieving my faith, I go from identifying losses, to processing them. I allow myself to remember, to reminisce, to write about it, to feel the pain and to cry. Educating myself about grief has been most helpful. Understanding how grief is exhausting and disorientating and how I use distractions to avoid the work of grief has helped me. Learning to grieve the good, the bad and what I will miss going forward because of my choice has been healing.
I have begun to adjust to an environment where faith is no more. I love our Sunday mornings. I love my new freedom of choice, the things I am learning and the new appreciation for the people of this world. I have rethought morals, purpose and values and find that none are lacking, even without Christianity. The adjustment has taken months if not years and will continue. As each new holiday and event comes I need to rethink how it will be meaningful. Every time I pray with others, I think of what that means for me, which I talked about a few weeks ago.
The last step of this process is to me where I most live, though these grief steps are not linear. They overlap and co-exist in different strengths at different times. They also fade at different rates. So what is this step? it is reinvesting in something else, reconstructing my new world. It is about withdrawing emotional and physical energy that i gave to Christianity and reinvesting it something else. What is that something else? It is first in myself, who I am, my identity and what I have to offer myself, my family and friends, my community and the world. I also am discovering what tools I need for my life. Where I find strength, comfort, safety, help and more.
I am learning to be aware of my needs, to let go of dependency on religion and learn to care of myself. I am realizing this takes work and time, there are learned skills which take time to master. I am learning to reclaim my feelings and emotions and not suppress them, though that one is hard. I am turning toward myself with curiosity, compassion and love. I am painting, writing and making meaning. These are some of my tools.
I am also learning how to live with pain, both physical due to my EDS, and due to emotions like imposter syndrome, procrastination, fear of others and isolation. I know what I don’t want, and that is to be cynical about life, stuck in grief or constantly angry about religion. I learned about nihilism this week. It’s the idea that nothing can known or communicated, that life is meaningless, there is no love and there is an extreme skeptism in life. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be hardened, cynical and bitter. I don’t want that for any of you either. Peace is different than resignation and callousness. While those who deconvert may go through a time of those, my hope is that none will stay there, that we all will find a place of beauty and joy in this amazing world and a place of peace and purpose in themselves. My hope is that we all find a new community.
I need to find my own place of non-religious spirituality. I need to learn from Jesus, from Buddha and from the Creator and from others who will show me what i means to be all the human I can be while being connected to the world and others. But I am not looking for wisdom from within religion, but rather from the words of the wise. I want to learn more of spiritual practices that will help me and give me the tools that will strengthen me. I had a friend tell me they gain strength from meditation. That sounds worth exploring.
Please take the time to grieve. To identify, then remember and to process what has come before. Take time to adjust to life without the same faith you had before. Then do the work of reconstructing the new you, the new tools you will use, and your new spirituality as you choose. You have the ability to be the person you want to be. Stop for just a moment and imagine who you want to be. Do you want to be strong, to be compassionate, to be loving, to be an effective person who brings positive change in the world? Will you fight for change from within the church or from outside of faith? Let’s each find our place and make a difference. Let’s find the tools that will help us. And let’s join together and be the community we need!
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