The Parable of the Writer’s Circle
I do not need to read ghost stories.
My mind can conjure monsters on its own.
I have no desire toward horror films.
My anxiety is its own poltergeist,
Seizing my body
Into tight tremors of tension.
Along with these internal terrosmiths,
The storytellers
Around the campfires of my heart and mind
Make a motley fellowship
As they spin their yarns.
Some exchange bawdy tales
Of lust and desire.
Others sing sacred psalms and incantations
In praise of a holy world.
A beat of poets
Recites their lines
Of love and pain and wonder
With metered voices,
And I am mesmerized by their orations
Of romance, ire, and conviction.
Meanwhile,
No small number of raconteurs
Weaves whispers of woe
To infiltrate my dreams
And limbs.
These are all inventions.
Each story is an illusion
Of light and shadow,
Crafted in the writing halls
Of my imagination.
Here a million nervous scriptwriters
Hash out every past and future argument
And interaction,
Each word
Branching like the roots
Of an aspen clone
To cover every outcome.
My legs twitch
In time with my clenching jaw
And ticking eye,
Typing out staccato stress,
Setting the scene
For restless nights
Where I become a mummy
Trapped and bound
As I writhe in wrapping sheets.
But then
Is this not the same team of visionaries
Who remind me to go outside
And let the sun scribble softly
In warm gentleness
Across my skin?
Is this not also
My alert and faithful archivists
Who make icons of the faces and words
Of those I have loved
Even after they were long gone
From this world?
And isn’t this campfire session
Also attended by the playful child
Who listens eagerly
And in awe, prone
To random fits of joy and laughter?
And what about the editors
Who blot out the bloated plots,
And even the critics, who,
When listened to gently,
And with compassion for myself,
Might expose a path of growth?
In the novels of our lives
We encounter historians
Documenting truth
As well as authors prone to fantasy
Both grave and glorious.
And for those of us keen enough to hear,
We also entertain angels
With tidings of good news
And grace,
And exhortations to be not afraid.
And then there are those great speculators
Who show us the marvels of the future,
That we can barely imagine for ourselves,
For no biography is purely objective,
Nor is it written by a single pen.
No,
All of us
And all of our stories
Are a lexicon of joy and grief,
An atlas of love and loss,
And an epic of fact and fantasy.
Sometimes metaphor
Can be more real
Than cold and bitter truth.
A parable may last forever
As it gets told again
Through generations.
So let me write today’s pages
With all the grace and beauty I can summon,
The ink of my presence here
Indelible on the hearts of those I treasure
And washed away
From the fingers I’ve pointed
In wrath and judgment.
And may my books be illustrated
Kindly
All the way to the last page.
And let each chapter’s end
Close not like a coffin lid,
But rather
Leave me as breathless
And hungry for the future
As a rapt and curious pageturner.
May my life be
A story savored,
A story shared,
A creative fiction,
And authentic portrait,
A parable of seeds sown
And talents tended.
May it become a book of dreams,
A pop-up biography
That unfolds into a psalter
Of wondrous praise and joy.
In 2005 I was thirty years old and helming an international Christian ministry. We had followers all over the world, and the ministry was experiencing great success by just about every metric.
One of those “metrics” was Basim, a young husband and father in Pakistan who converted to Christianity after stumbling across our website in an Internet cafe a few years earlier. I began to mentor him personally, because he felt a calling on his life, and he had nowhere else to turn in Karachi without the possibility of causing problems for himself and his family. His wife was upset with his conversion, considering him a heretic. Over the years, she had never softened in that respect.
During the time of Basim’s training, I felt like I was doing sacred work, teaching him what I believed to be true. I’d had my own spiritual encounter In the 90s and dropped out of art school to go to seminary. I thought relationships like this were similar to things I’d read about in the New Testament, where a teacher would take on disciples, who would then go on to become great teachers themselves. It was a heady time, and I was absolutely certain that I would be doing this for the rest of my life.
And then I met another theologian who was part of the “emerging church” movement.
The seminary I’d gone to was, at the time, the world’s only gay-friendly evangelical seminary, and I had wholeheartedly embraced what was called “liberal fundamentalism.” This brand of Christianity taught liberation theology and social justice, but also that the Bible was inerrant, that evolution was wrong, and that God’s blessing could be measured in prosperity and health — which we were entitled to through the concept of “biblical promises.”
Then, after meeting that other minster (and actually listening to what he had to say instead of arguing), I started down a path of deconstructing everything I believed in. Once I started asking myself why I believed what I believed, it became like a loose thread in a tapestry of my identity, and every time I pulled on it, more of myself would unravel.
Over the course of a year or so, I started seeing how rigid and misguided I’d been, but I still clung to the idea that the Bible was the Word of God, and that I could somehow figure out all of life’s mysteries if I just studied it enough.
Looking back, I now see this as an early manifestation of my addiction to certainty, and just like an addict, my life had begun to spiral out of control. I’d taken Greek in seminary, so I dusted it off and set to going through the New Testament in Greek, as if that would allow me to uncover every hidden thing in the (assumed) original text. I truly believed that all of my theological and existential questions could be answered if only I studied the Bible enough and in the right way.
Then I got to the second epistle of Peter where, instead of the typical words used for hell or the grave, he uses “Tartarus,” the pagan Greek word for both the underworld seat of judgment where the Titans were imprisoned, as well as the name of the god that ruled that underworld. And he spoke of this as a real place.
That was the final stitch holding all of my theology and identity together, and once I pulled on that thread, everything fell into a tangled heap that no longer had shape or form — or meaning.
If what I was reading was correct (and it was — I checked with so many sources), it meant that Peter either actually believed in the pagan idea of Tartarus, or he was speaking metaphorically.
If Peter — the same guy who insisted that early Christians still had to convert to Judaism and follow strict laws — believed in Tartarus, then this was a radical shift in everything I’d ever thought about theology and faith. And if he was speaking metaphorically, then that meant there were almost certainly other metaphors written into the Bible, which is anathema to a fundamentalist literal interpretation of Scripture. My fundamentalist theology just couldn’t hold the incredible tension between those two thoughts.
And so I started doubting everything.
I kept this doubt to myself, trying to preach less dogmatically and opening up to mystery as much as I could while also watching everything I knew unravel. I thought maybe I could still be vulnerable and bring people along with me on the journey, but I wasn’t yet ready to be responsible for causing doubt or admitting that I had misled all those people for all those years, so I only hinted at it, asking questions in my sermons rather than giving answers. I talked about how a relationship with Christ was more important than faith in him, how the Bible spends a lot more time on love and kindness than it does on judgment and purity. I watered my message down to the level where I felt like I wasn’t a hypocrite, slowly coming to grips with the fact that I was, as the REM song goes, losing my religion.
And then Basim was kidnapped by the Taliban.
I hadn’t shared any of my theological struggles with him. He was a fairly new convert and was on fire with a convert’s zeal — and I just didn’t want to disrupt that. He was where I’d been several years before, and I didn’t want to take that from him, so I kept putting off any discussions about my shifting ideologies, my enormous questions, the misshapen heap of my life that was left after a thorough deconstruction.
Basim’s kidnapping forced me to confront all of that, though. His wife’s family had taken him north to a Taliban enclave in the mountains, but that’s all anyone knew. Some of his followers told me that they would kill him for apostasy, while others thought he was being tortured in order to make him renounce his faith.
Either way, I felt lost, bereaved, and responsible for all of this. He’d converted because of me, had taken on my own theology, and here he was possibly being tortured or murdered for it even though I no longer believed in it!
Thankfully, Basim was released. Yes, he had been brutally tortured and almost killed, but he promised his wife’s family that he would never try to convert her, and he would let her raise their son however she wanted, so they let him go. He still wanted to continue Christian ministry, though, and he felt his life was in danger, so I sent him money to go to another country, where he could attend a university with a robust theology department, with help from a YWAM scholarship. All anyone there knew was that we were helping him get a degree, which would be valuable in itself, so his family agreed. As far as I know, he never told anyone that he was going to the university’s seminary program.
After Basim’s release, I realized that I could no longer preach in good faith, so I put the ministry in hibernation and took a year-long sabbatical to figure out what to do next.
A year later, I had to let everyone know that I was never coming back.
That was the hardest year of my life until then. Every single part of my identity was wrapped up in this sense of calling, of purpose, of belief. Up until then I honestly thought we were living in the “last days” and that I would be raptured along with other Christians sometime during my lifetime. I’d written a master’s thesis on a pre-tribulation rapture eschatology, and I had studied creation science with Kurt Wise from Harvard. I honestly believed that I’d experienced miracles due to my faith and prayer. Now here I was questioning if I even still believed in God.
Who was I, if not a minister, much less a Christian? What was the point of life if not to do good and live ethically, the guidelines for which I had completely constructed from the Bible? Add to that that I completely lost faith in the idea of “the end times,” much less the idea that I would be raptured, and all of a sudden I was forced to confront my fears of aging and death in ways I’d never had to consider before.
For someone addicted to certainty and perfectionism, the loss of faith is a serious rock bottom.
Now, nearly twenty years later, I’m still wrestling with some of those questions. But even more, I think I have started to see the value of the questions themselves, rather than just zealously looking for answers.
This drive for answers and certainty is not exclusive to Christianity either. Every organization or belief can have its fundamentalists, and just recently I’ve witnessed friends struggle with trying to make sense of the senseless, desperate to find meaning, figure out “what the universe is trying to tell me” or discover “what lesson I am supposed to learn in all of this.”
As I’ve written recently, several of my closest friends are experiencing enormous losses, and this has thrown them into the same kind of identity-level questions I experienced when my faith unspooled into mystery.
Who am I without my husband? Why is this happening to me? Do I even want to do this work anymore? Why am I being punished? What did I do wrong? Where do I belong? Is this all my fault? Do I even want to live anymore?
These are hard questions that so many people I know are having to ask themselves right now, and in my daily practice I’ve been chewing on them a lot these past couple of weeks.
Last week I cohosted another retreat. My installation centered around a ritual where people could write out their regrets, catharses, wishes, intentions, prayers, and words of thanksgiving, and then offer those to a sacred fire. Each person was then invited to sum up their experience in a few words and then offer that to the group, eventually becoming part of a collective poem from all the assembled offerings.
Over and over again people recounted their grief, their losses, their regrets, their doubts and frustrations. People wept. Strangers hugged. Some shared openly while others shared only with me, and some kept their writing to themselves or only shared vague lines for the poem. Afterward, many said it was transformative.
Somehow, for that one night, we became sacred vessels for each others; grief, and in that witnessing, we, ourselves, were transformed. We saw that we were not alone, that there was hope, that somebody cares.
Did that answer the deep questions people came holding in their hearts?
Perhaps not. But it certainly gave them comfort, and the practice showed them that they could then become part of something bigger, or at least let go of the things they no longer needed. The ritual gave us all a framework through which we could imagine that the fire was burning away our losses and grief, transforming our prayers and intentions into sparks, and then lifting our praises to the heavens like smoke. It was a symbol of the transformation all of us were experiencing together — the transformation we all face in this life.
If you would have told me twenty years ago that my life would look like this, I’d have thought you were crazy. I truly believed that I was in a single straight and narrow path. And then, all of a sudden, I met someone who changed my life.
How many times has that happened since? Sometimes it isn’t a meeting that changes me, but a loss, or an epiphany, or years of therapy, or a global news event. Again and again I find myself transforming, shifting, changing in so many ways.
The world has words for that, and they are not usually kind.
Flake. Chameleon. Charlatan. Unmoored. Shifty. Unreliable. Shallow. Impressionable. Capricious. Vacillating. Flip-flopper. Fake. Scatterbrained. ADHD. Misguided. Lost.
I’ve certainly been called more than a few of these. Anyone who know me knows that I am not any of these things in most senses of these words, but I bristle against that reduction too, that any of these traits are somehow bad in and of themselves. I have been unmoored. I have been unreliable. My faith has been shaken. I have been lost. I have flip-flopped enormous beliefs and values — because I have grown.
I have evolved.
I recently learned that Darwin never said, “survival of the fittest.” His words were actually “survival of the fit,” and his definition of “fit” was being able to adapt. Survival wasn’t about strength. It wasn’t about righteousness. It wasn’t about identity or ruthlessness or competition or mating or extreme specialization or any of the other attributes western ideology has turned into Darwinian meritocracy. No, it was about flexibility, resilience, and often it was about coexistence and mutual benefit.
So now, twenty years after first confronting my hardline fundamentalist creationist theology, I find myself defending Darwin.
Because anyone who pays attention and asks important questions does just what I did — they engage, they shift, they learn, they grow out of old beliefs and identities and explore new ones. Shedding a rigid structure of ethics and dogma, they can often begin to embrace mystery rather than cling desperately to certainty, to labels, to convenient elevator-pitches about who they are.
When someone asks who I am or what I do, I have no convenient answers. Perhaps I should just say, “I’m still figuring that out — and hopefully will be for the rest of my life.”
Or maybe I’ll just say, “I’m doing my best every day to be fit for this world.”
Perhaps that’s the best we can hope for. Some people may have a strong sense of identity, but that doesn’t mean all of us need to have that — or should have that. Western culture (and especially Internet and self-help cultures) make it seem like finding our “calling” or “life’s purpose” is the single most important thing we can do to be happy and fulfilled, but I am not so sure about that.
The human life span is getting longer and the world is changing at an accelerated pace, so why should we expect self-assured stability and unwavering purpose be what guides us most successfully through all this tumult? In my nearly fifty years, I have seen almost every part of life and society change, and I have adapted along with it so far. As painful as it was to lose my identity — in the multiple times I’ve had to do that — it has been worth it to come to a place where I don’t have to cling to some idea of who I am supposed to be.
I’ve learned to have a sense of grace and humor when I ask myself those same old questions about who I am and what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the answers to those questions are going to keep changing, just as they have for the past forty-nine years I’ve been alive.
Plus, where does my identity even come from? I probably never would have been a fundamentalist Christian if I hadn’t been born into my specific family. I probably wouldn’t have sought a career in ministry had I not survived a near-death experience as a child and been labeled “the miracle baby” by my entire hometown, always being told that I had some huge calling in my life. I’ve inherited my beliefs, my values, my morals, my goals, my likes and dislikes, my culture, my norms, the things that make me sentimental, and so much more from my family, my society, my peers, my education, the stories and media I’ve absorbed, along with all of the assumptions and decisions I’ve stacked upon each other throughout my life.
I’ve learned that in some sects of Buddhism, this deconstruction of the ego or identity forms a key practice and path to enlightenment. Just like when I pulled on the tapestry of my identity and let it all unfurl into a mess, some Buddhists make a practice of examining all of the things that “make” them who they are, from their bodies to their beliefs, both inherited and intentional. Are they a product of their culture? Did they come to this or that belief on their own, or did they learn it from someone else?
Is their identity wrapped up in their appearance, whether that be in physical form like attractiveness or external piety as signaled by shaved heads and saffron robes? Are they any more or less themselves when dressed a certain way, or with a certain teacher’s blessing? Are they separate from the billions of individual microbes growing in their guts — or from the ground from which their meal came, or the community in which they live, or the birds that sing and give them comfort, or the stranger on the other side of the world that they don’t even know exists? If everything is impermanent and all is an illusion, then what does that make them in this moment?
In this way, they surrender to the great mystery that just as we are only who we are because of a vast collective experience of things that come to gather to “make” us, so too are we individuals with our own consciousness. We are connected and isolated, we are eternal and gone in a moment, we are who we are and we are not who we think we are. We are a collection of untold numbers of things that have formed us, from genes to advertisements that program our desires, and yet we are also singular and holy, responsible for the expression of our free will.
Life is truth, and life is an illusion. It is made up of all of these random things, and yet, the way they coalesce into this time and place makes us who we are — and we are unique and sacred in that beingness.
How the hell does one write an elevator pitch for that?
Surrendering to the beautiful contradictions and dynamic tensions of this life doesn’t make for a good biographical paragraph in a resume or a concise introduction at a party. And that’s okay. Along with most of the other eight billion people in this world, I guess I’m still figuring it out.
I’m doing my best every day to be fit for this world.
I hope you are too, and just like I did for participants around that sacred fire ritual last week, I want to hold space for you to wrestle with life’s big questions too.
In the meantime, I hope we can all find grace and gratitude on this revelatory journey. And perhaps most of all, I hope we can all write our own stories with a sense of hope, of love, of curiosity, of wonder — and when one chapter ends, that we have the courage to start writing another even if the plot has to completely change.
The Parable of the Writer’s Circle
I do not need to read ghost stories.
My mind can conjure monsters on its own.
I have no desire toward horror films.
My anxiety is its own poltergeist,
Seizing my body
Into tight tremors of tension.
Along with these internal terrosmiths,
The storytellers
Around the campfires of my heart and mind
Make a motley fellowship
As they spin their yarns.
Some exchange bawdy tales
Of lust and desire.
Others sing sacred psalms and incantations
In praise of a holy world.
A beat of poets
Recites their lines
Of love and pain and wonder
With metered voices,
And I am mesmerized by their orations
Of romance, ire, and conviction.
Meanwhile,
No small number of raconteurs
Weaves whispers of woe
To infiltrate my dreams
And limbs.
These are all inventions.
Each story is an illusion
Of light and shadow,
Crafted in the writing halls
Of my imagination.
Here a million nervous scriptwriters
Hash out every past and future argument
And interaction,
Each word
Branching like the roots
Of an aspen clone
To cover every outcome.
My legs twitch
In time with my clenching jaw
And ticking eye,
Typing out staccato stress,
Setting the scene
For restless nights
Where I become a mummy
Trapped and bound
As I writhe in wrapping sheets.
But then
Is this not the same team of visionaries
Who remind me to go outside
And let the sun scribble softly
In warm gentleness
Across my skin?
Is this not also
My alert and faithful archivists
Who make icons of the faces and words
Of those I have loved
Even after they were long gone
From this world?
And isn’t this campfire session
Also attended by the playful child
Who listens eagerly
And in awe, prone
To random fits of joy and laughter?
And what about the editors
Who blot out the bloated plots,
And even the critics, who,
When listened to gently,
And with compassion for myself,
Might expose a path of growth?
In the novels of our lives
We encounter historians
Documenting truth
As well as authors prone to fantasy
Both grave and glorious.
And for those of us keen enough to hear,
We also entertain angels
With tidings of good news
And grace,
And exhortations to be not afraid.
And then there are those great speculators
Who show us the marvels of the future,
That we can barely imagine for ourselves,
For no biography is purely objective,
Nor is it written by a single pen.
No,
All of us
And all of our stories
Are a lexicon of joy and grief,
An atlas of love and loss,
And an epic of fact and fantasy.
Sometimes metaphor
Can be more real
Than cold and bitter truth.
A parable may last forever
As it gets told again
Through generations.
So let me write today’s pages
With all the grace and beauty I can summon,
The ink of my presence here
Indelible on the hearts of those I treasure
And washed away
From the fingers I’ve pointed
In wrath and judgment.
And may my books be illustrated
Kindly
All the way to the last page.
And let each chapter’s end
Close not like a coffin lid,
But rather
Leave me as breathless
And hungry for the future
As a rapt and curious pageturner.
May my life be
A story savored,
A story shared,
A creative fiction,
And authentic portrait,
A parable of seeds sown
And talents tended.
May it become a book of dreams,
A pop-up biography
That unfolds into a psalter
Of wondrous praise and joy.
I love you,
Eric
The most beautiful, heartful description of deconstruction I've encountered. With you I welcome all dreamers, writers, scribes, editors, critics, and children you have been and remain. Bill Fay: There's a melody / Somewhere deep / At the heart of it / There's a melody // There's a rhythm and rhyme / To years and days / There's a signature / At the bottom of the page.
I relate to your experiences on so many levels. It feels like I've been asking "who am I?" and "why am I here?" for a very, very long time. Almost everything I do stems from this questioning and the evolution of my identity in the process. Trying to "fit" myself to this world feels impossible at times. I know I must allow room for all the writers in my inner circle, whether or not I am particularly fond of them. Thank you for bringing some peace to me today with the reminder that I am not alone in the questioning and that I can allow grace to permeate my deep need for certainty and answers.