Why I miss being right about everything

I used to know so much more than I know now. I was sure I had everything figured out. Maybe that’s just part of what we need to survive as we grow up; we need the unearned confidence of youth or we’d never have enough courage to live.

I was held in a particular kind of certainty by my religious framework of belief. I grew up immersed in Christianity and the church, and a form of Christianity that expected and encouraged regular experiences with God. Hearing from God, revelations from God, healing miracles performed by God – God was expected to intervene regularly. And the bible was not just an ancient sacred text, it was somehow the means through which God could speak directly to me, sitting in my bedroom; just an earnest kid desiring intimate connection with the great power that rules the world.

If you put this form of spirituality together with a potent framework of in and out, church and world, saved and unsaved, heaven and hell, then I was happy to be on the right side. I was “in”, I was one of the good guys and I knew how the world worked. To be honest, there’s something intoxicating about this feeling and sometimes I miss it. I miss the feeling of being convinced I’m right. I miss the feeling of being supremely confident that things will turn out okay. I miss the feeling of knowing that God will answer my prayers if I pray them fervently and repeatedly. There are all sorts of things I miss.

But life doesn’t always follow the script you’re given. Sometimes it takes a sideways turn, unexpected things happen, and you realise that things aren’t quite as certain as you thought. And when you pull at that thread, at the nagging question that you realise was always there – just under the surface of things – you realise that the certainty was a mirage.

Over time, I came to realise that life was more complex than the binary categories I’d adopted and that perhaps I knew less than I thought. I remember when I began studying theology - a small crack started to open in the seemingly impenetrable wall of confidence I had built around me. And the “problem” was that the new insights I was finding were not dangerous or destructive – as I had been warned – but were in fact life-giving and liberating, even if they caused me to question many of my previously held assumptions. And what I came to realise was that although I had been very sure of myself, I had also been deeply anxious, because the God I believed in was one who was well designed to foster anxiety.

I also learned that it doesn’t always go well for you when you question the wrong things. When I started to ask the hard questions of my own tradition I began discovering things that I thought everyone would be excited to know! But in reality it’s a difficult path to navigate and not everyone is as interested in the journey as you imagine. Our certainties function for us, otherwise we’d have abandoned many of them years ago. And our sense of belonging to a community is often held in place by adhering to a set of common beliefs. In this sense, the questioning of these beliefs can threaten the very foundations of our belonging. When the beliefs of our community become ideologies that cannot be questioned, we’ve set up a system that hates disruption - and exorcizes the disrupters.

A little over two years ago I completed a doctorate in theology and ironically find myself both less sure of what is ‘true’ and yet more confident about what truly matters. My own spiritual path continues to evolve and change and will continue to do so. I recognise now that it is in the movement itself that we find real life, because life is always moving; there is nothing that is static. Reality at its most fundamental (and sub-atomic) level is unpredictable and in motion. And we are always ‘present’ at the intersection between what was and what is coming, a present that we try desperately to inhabit but that often eludes us.

So where does this leave us? Even as you’re reading this, your response could range from “yes, this is exactly how I feel too” - right through to - “I don’t like this and I’m not sure how to respond to it” (and of course there’s a huge spectrum in-between). But beyond the idea of whether we instantly ‘agree’ with one another on everything, perhaps we can still find a way forward in honest and healthy dialogue.

I’m using this phrase “In the Shift” because that’s where we are. Whether we realise it or not many of us are in a process of spiritual and religious change, and we’re also in a time of profound social, cultural and political flux. My hope is that authentic conversations about theology, about spirituality, about our experiences and stories, can help lead us toward a more healthy and life-giving way of being in the world.  

That’s my hope for this project, the blog, the podcast and anything else that comes along. A spirituality that is embodied and material, a growing understanding of ourselves and one another, and the fostering of an imagination that allows us to see the world differently from the scripts we’re given by the systems of power (political, cultural, economic and religious) that currently shape our world. Life very seldom follows these scripts, but we’re given them anyway. And anxiety can sit under the surface as we struggle to navigate the tension between the story we think we’re supposed to be living and the one we’re actually experiencing.

So this is a space to explore what happens when we’re okay with life and faith going off script. What do we do now with God and meaning and beauty and spirituality and community and power and ideology and oppression and liberation and hope and cynicism and trauma and suffering and grief and joy and all the things in between? Is there still something to be said, and is there something both hopeful and honest to be found? I think there is.