new forms: ablerism.micro.blog
@ablerism I do know that my time in atheism was a necessary acid bath. The last twenty-five years of my spiritual life have been rather circuitous and I don’t know where I’ll end up. But I absolutely needed to be stripped of my ideas about God, who by that time had just become a piece of mental furniture. Only after that was I able to re-engage with Christianity in friendly openness. I even came to appreciate what I was given in my bonkers fundamentalist childhood!
@jabel I really, really get it. In adulthood, I was just wandering around in a kind of agnostic humanism for a long while, one decade out and one back in church, before a…conversion-on-a-long-timeline? Still figuring out what happened. But I see now the gift of it all (even with a lot of pain).
@ReaderJohn @ablerism I understand the “figuring out what happened” thing. I’ve looked back at times on the blog post I wrote shortly after leaving the Holiness churches for the LCMS and think “What a tidy story you’ve created there. Now whether or not it’s true….”
@ablerism Erin Plunkett’s essay “Walking Homeward I found to be a wonderful example of exactly this quote from Weil. As someone who has no idea how to offer my kids even a fraction of what I’ve felt very lucky to find and experience, I’m very grateful to see these public conversations. These things are, in my experience, utterly nonexistent in the daily trenches
@ablerism Really interesting to think through. I like how Nijay Gupta and A.J. Swobodo talk about doubt as a core part of faith. After all, if you don’t doubt, then you don’t exercise faith (although not doubting at all and giving up straight away would also be not exercising faith). I find it interesting considering how often “backsliding” or “Walking away” is seen as this real negative and how (unfortunately) many abandon friends when they do as they “Aren’t good influences” or something like that.
@ChrisJWilson Right, and I have to say that the evangelical reliance on “deconstructing” has always sounded so strange to my ear. Like, I think you just mean…continuing to think through difficult issues that have plagued the modern believer for centuries? Weathering the maturation process?
@jabel Yeah. I’m realizing over adulthood that our whole story can get recast by time and experience. I frequently ask myself: Can I let my story shift in the face of new data, new perspective?
@ablerism @ChrisJWilson Daniel Taylor’s Skeptical Believers is a book I’ve recommended many times. It’s got depth but with an almost kid-like simplicity throughout. Also, “disentangling” is an good alternative word to “deconstructing” I’ve taken from Kate Boyd