Bless it And Leave it

Let’s do a little experiment.

Remember when you had to clean out your childhood bedroom – you gave things away, left things behind, and I imagine you wondered, “Why in the world did I keep this?”

My guess is you never said, “I hate this. This is evil.” We may have said, “I don’t need that anymore” or “This was a part of a different time in my life.”

The G.I. Joe figures and aircraft.

Teddy Ruxpin.

Barbie and a half dozen shoes, none of them matching.

The lettermen jacket, the class ring, the pictures, the posters…

You know you’ve been there. Plus, is my generational bias showing?

The things we leave behind, or leave to others, still have value. We can “speak well” of them – we can bless them.

But there is a conflict that often comes between the blessing and the leaving.

When I walk with people through times of deconstructing and rebuilding their faith, the above scenario is what they’re often wrestling with. How do I leave things behind that I still truly love, but I can no longer stay there?  

Do I have to condemn where I used to be to move towards where I’m headed? In their defense, many critics of deconstruction & reconstruction have reinforced this thought.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when a person hears, “You must hate your faith to want to leave it” but they cannot overcome the inner longing and invitation to do just that.

Too often we conflate leaving the “Faith” (the place of struggling and succeeding in life with the Divine) for leaving “faith” (a specific form or structure for navigating, understanding, and embodying life with the Divine). They aren’t the same.

There are a variety of ways to talk about the scenario I’m describing here. The writer Ken Wilbur describes it as “transcend and include.”

Scholar Walter Brueggemann talks about this – in the context of the Psalms – as orientation, disorientation, and reorientation.

However we talk about it, the point is that our spiritual growth and maturity will always require us to leave behind our previous ways of thinking about God, self, and others. Then, we’ll move on to different forms that will take shape in us through a process of trial and error. Much like a teenager moving into young adulthood, when we operate with the default settings there will always be hiccups and abrasions.

But to take on that journey in a generative and loving way means we learn how to bless those previous ways rather than curse them.

I have a great deal of hope for a world where we learn to bless something, then leave it.

We might bless our previous images of God for how they led us toward hopeful reflection, then we leave them behind for new images that draw us further into the world of the Divine.

The ways we prayed in youth and exuberance seems naïve to us now, but without it our conversation with the Divine would never have grown or emerged. We can bless those early prayers, then we leave them behind.

The point of contention here is that too many people see deconstruction of faith as leaving without blessing.

Those deconstructing faith, looking at their past traditions and communities, only see people who never left but bless everything that we can no longer embrace.

Sometimes both the blessing and the leaving seem like a rejection – one group to another.

This is a truly unnecessary division. 

We experience this division most acutely in restlessness, which is the place between where we cannot go back and we have no idea how to move forward. Between the spiritual (and sometimes) literal home we know and love, and the destination yet to come, we feel unsettled. Afraid. Irritated.

I don’t know everything about those restless places, though I know a bit, but the one thing I am confident in is that if the restlessness is going to be valuable to us it requires that we bless some things and leave them behind.  

To walk through the wilderness of the in-between times of our spiritual journey we must pack lightly.

There are things that simply no longer have use to us when we’re leaving something behind and heading for a future we cannot imagine. What we leave behind has value, and we can speak well of it, but we cannot take it with us.

We bless it, and we leave it.

Today, I invite you to consider with me a few things:

What have we left behind that we have not blessed?

Where has a past goodness been swept up into a story of hurt, misunderstanding, and shortsightedness? Have we hated what was because we could no longer live with it, not knowing that without that very movement we would not be where we are?

To believe God is warrior is the conversation before knowing God as compassionate, graceful, and healing.

For me, it took a long time to bless the habits of silence and inner focus from my earlier spiritual journey even though I could no longer live with the fire and brimstone theology that turned life with Jesus into a minute-by-minute moral contest for survival.

What if today you were to speak well of the former ways of faith and the people who gave you that foundation? You don’t have to bless abusers, however. In blessing our former ways of faith we sift through the dangerous folks to find the ones who got swept up with the hurt though they were rarely the agents of it.

What have we blessed that we have not yet left behind?

We feel the weight of needing to move forward, the restlessness of it, and yet we cannot see our way clear of this good thing. The comfortable cocoon of an idea, practice, or community is a difficult surface to crack through.  

And yet, the Spirit of Jesus is whispering so quietly: you feel that irritation? You sense that “edge”? Follow me, let’s explore it. Just know that you won’t be coming back to this place again.

I’ve said this many times before: we’ll leave an idea (theology, doctrine, practice) behind well before we leave the community who holds that idea.

What if you brought that good thing to mind, spoke a blessing over it and then made the decision to leave for the “far country” the Divine is pointing toward?

What do we refuse to bless that we cannot, for some reason, leave behind?

For some of us, we feel trapped and we have succumbed to cynicism. What good will it do, we argue. In that case, we have no longer reached the point where the pain of staying here is greater than the unknown, mysterious journey our restlessness is calling us to pursue.

There are many I know who are in this space and due to their cynicism and anger they double down on beliefs and practices they detest, forcing them onto others, while at the same time cultivating a deep bitterness that will eventually surface in spiritual and personal calamity.

Or perhaps it won’t, which may be worse. To destruct at least would allow for rebuilding. To live in that state forever is a kind of hell.

In all of the above cases, however you may see them in your own life, I welcome you to know that the Divine has not left you in the space between blessing and leaving. You are accompanied. There is wisdom simmering below the surface.

In conversations.

In things you read.

In silence.

In prayer.

In nature.

In breathing.

In exercise.

The journey ahead is beautiful, long, and often takes all that we have. But it is worth it.

Today, talk with someone you trust about this idea – perhaps a spiritual director – and know that you are welcomed to a simply stated but perilously conducted journey:

To bless it and then to leave it, only to arrive at a new place of blessing.

Photo by shawnanggg on Unsplash