“Deconstructing” is a term I’ve grown accustomed to. To me it means that deeply held assumptions and beliefs, when faced with sufficient contradicting experience, have a habit of producing cognitive dissonance, which compels a reassessment. Just like Jenga, it’s only a matter of time before chipping away at the tower leads to its collapse. It’s become such a frequent occurrence for me that I seem to have developed a bit of acrophobia since the last time I was brave enough to be introspective.
The process was introduced to me in formal academic study of the Bible, and that’s certainly where it’s been most industrious. What other field can offer such an enticement as truth of an eternal consequence…if only you study a bit more. Though the consequences seem to involve deconstructing more than constructing, I accepted long ago that it would be better to live behind a humble perimeter of reliable and genuine faith than to hide behind a bulwark of “truth” based on lesser standards.
Memory, it seems, has been among the casualties I’ve attributed to the general toll the year in the Middle East took on me, but the atrophy of my prayers remains vivid. Verbosity in prayer has never been my talent, but especially in this last year, to experience the deconstruction of prayer itself has been matched in brutally only by its intimacy. Prayer is the most authentic locus I have right now for understanding my feelings about the spiritual arena. The inability to reconcile the prayers I speak with my experiences and what I disbelieve has left me mute. The gravity of the issues before me in prayer multiplied by the deluge of internal conflict has reduced my prayers to “O God.” It’s all I can muster, and certainly these 4 characters do not supply the weight accompanying them when they escape my lips. Maybe this is truly all that’s left when the dross is finally stripped away and words cease to offer meaning for what I have to hold up to heaven. Or maybe these 4 characters are all that’s left after an overzealous deconstructive approach to Biblical Studies has taken its toll, having finally received the coup de grâce from the extreme nature of the work in the Middle East. Time shall tell.
