To Journey and Be Transformed: Three Books That Helped

Aug 29

Written By Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery

My faith, as I knew it, collapsed over twenty years ago, before the word “deconstruction” was a familiar catch-phrase, before “exvangelical” and “deconversion” were popular hashtags. I was part of a charismatic faith community teeming with young artists and musicians, a community I had shaped my life around, and though I had a few friends who were also grappling with their own faith questions, I felt very much alone.

Not long ago, I was going through old journals from that time. Reading those journals—page after page of doubts and confusion I could barely articulate—reminded me how private I’d been with my process. I didn’t dare speak some of my doubts aloud, especially the biggest one: that it had occurred to me that the whole foundation of my faith was built on the threat of hell. That I’d gotten on the faith train there, and had ridden it into my mid-20s, wholly devoted, hands raised, voice lifted, until I realized I didn’t want to be on that train anymore.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want God (whatever that meant now). It was that I couldn’t stomach so much of what had come along by default: the revival meetings, the prophetic services that had turned questionable and sometimes frightening, some of the people in my life who were (I was starting to realize) spiritually manipulative and controlling.

If I’d had the term “deconstruction” in my vocabulary at the time, I may have fancied myself in the middle of a process and reached out for supportive resources. But I had no such context. Something I’d given my life to no longer worked; it was that simple. Like a pair of pants that had shrunk in the wash, the belief systems that had become so comfortable no longer fit me. 

I remember one spring afternoon, I went for a walk. I pictured all my ideas about God and life tangled up in a terrible snarl. There were beautiful things in there—community, music, a seeking for the divine—and terrible things—the spiritual control, the conditional friendships, the fear and threat woven into the foundations of it all. A few weeks earlier, in a worship team meeting, I had voiced my doubts about the inerrancy of scripture, and later, the pastor had taken me aside. “I feel from the Lord to warn you that if you go down this road, your very soul is at stake”. But by then I was sure that any God who wasn’t okay with my questions was not a God I was interested in serving.

As I walked, I acknowledged that I didn’t know how to untangle the good parts from the bad parts. If I was to have any chance of making sense of it all, I needed to start from scratch. The only way forward was to let go. I stopped under an old elm tree and imagined holding the knotted mess in my cupped hands. I opened my hands and let it all smash to pieces on the sidewalk. Then, I turned and walked home.

For a long time afterward, I felt profound relief. “I want to live, live, live,” I wrote in my journal in blue ballpoint pen, going over and over the letters until they were dark and prominent on the page. Another journal page shows some scribbled song lyrics: “I’m tired of being a watcher on the wall/I just want trees that rise up tall.”

After years of seeking the glory of God, of keyed-up revival meetings and reaching for something that never seemed to arrive, I wanted nothing more than to live an ordinary life. I planted a vegetable garden, painted the walls of my living room periwinkle blue, poured cappuccinos at the cafe where I worked as a barista, and took long runs along the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood. I wasn’t trying to make sense of my faith collapse. I had let go and walked away. And yet everything I read—novels, self-help books, poetry—filtered in through the lens of that experience.

The books that supported me during that time were books that I happened upon as I aimed to live my ordinary life. One day after work, I stopped at the public library and found Julia Cameron’s book Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart. I loved her account of being in recovery and begrudgingly choosing a higher power, the only concept of God she could stand being a line from a Dylan Thomas poem, “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” I began to think of the energy behind the universe in the same way. This idea, along with the creative practices Julia suggested in the book, filled whatever hole religion had left.

Later that year, when Sharon Salzberg released Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, I was riveted. I’d never heard anyone talk about faith the way she did. I’d been spoon-fed concepts, told what should and shouldn’t have meaning. But Sharon talked about faith in a softer, more inclusive and open-hearted way. She shared an analogy to describe what happens when we allow fixed beliefs to shape reality for us. She likened it to “gazing at the sky through a straw. The sky is the unobstructed truth of who we are and what our lives are about.” When we receive belief systems that monitor that for us, it’s “as if we are looking at the truth through a narrow tube, seeing only a very small part of it while convinced we are seeing the whole.” She goes on to say that in the face of fear, some of us “hold onto our straws with a death grip”.

I realized I’d encountered that unobstructed sky when I’d let go of my faith the previous year. Sometimes the sky felt too big and glaring to look at, but I wanted to look at it as much as I could—bare and bright, without a straw in the way.

A few years later, Mark Nepo’s book The Exquisite Risk came out and became a profound resource for me. Mark Nepo writes about living with an open heart and listening deeply to our inner lives and embodying what we hear. I was starting to uncover the shrapnel of my religious upbringing, including a deeply ingrained belief that I couldn’t trust my own heart. This book helped me heal that and reconnect with the essence of what drew me to religion in the first place: my own hunger for the mystical, for the sacred.

So many things are underlined in “The Exquisite Risk”, but one line I share often with my clients and students is this, from page 12:

“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad.

To change without journeying is to be a chameleon.

To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.”

Later on down the page, Mark Nepo goes on to say: “It is our continual efforts to live from the pilgrim position that keep us close to the pulse of what is sacred.”

I’m not sure how my path might have been different if I’d grappled with my faith loss fifteen years later, in a world of resources (some helpful, some maybe not?), hashtags and TikTok videos. In a time when “faith deconstruction” has more language around it than it once did, I worry it runs the risk of becoming yet another straw to look at the sky through.

What if we’re just moving away from the confines of our old views and becoming pilgrims? Saying “yes” to being transformed by the journey, which is not a linear process with a fixed start and end point, but a way of being that we can embody for a lifetime?

Practice:

What books have helped you on your journey toward (in Sharon Salzberg’s words) trusting your own deepest experience? If it feels right, spend some time writing about the resources that have impacted you the most.