Deconstruction as Diaspora
The deconstructing Christian lives an exile all her own, and reminds us of ours.
This is Part II in a four-part series on Catholic Deconstruction.
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her ...
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
Hosea 2:14-15
Last week, I discussed Audrey Assad’s deconversion and the theological influence of Richard Rohr on the Catholic “side” of the Christian deconstruction movement. This, I hope, set the stage for the rest of this series. Over the next three weeks, I want to dig in to Scripture and Tradition to see what we might glean from the storehouse of “things old and new” - and whether we might find resources there that can help us rise to the occasion of our cultural moment. So we begin with Scripture this week.
Now, I will admit right off the bat that this week’s writing process did not go as planned. I promised you Job, Ecclesiastes, and Revelation, and fully intended to take these three books as our Biblical “case studies” in deconstruction, but something else has been on my mind as I’ve been thinking about the unique contribution of Scripture to this conversation.
The Bible certainly gives us many examples of individual cases that might cast some light on the experience of the deconstructing Christian - others have already invoked Scripture to justify, refute, or qualify deconstruction, and will surely continue to do so.1 Every instance of a “faith crisis” found in Scripture could, in some sense, be taken as a moral lesson for our times: Jacob’s wrestling with God could be seen as an image of the Christian wrestling with the foundations of faith; Job sitting in the dung heap, a metaphor for the long suffering and patience required to endure seasons of doubt and darkness; the Road to Emmaus beautifully expressing the desire of Jesus to meet us on the way out of Jerusalem, in the midst of crisis and disappointment (as Pope Benedict2 and N.T. Wright3 have already articulated much more eloquently than I ever could). The need for human beings to have their notions of God and faith restructured is a definite Biblical motif.
But as helpful as it may be to conceptualize the deconstruction experience in terms of individual characters or events in the Bible, it seems to me that the overarching narrative of Salvation History - the metanarrative, if you will, provides a richer illumination.
The Church is many things all at the same time.4 It is the Mystical Body of Christ, uniting all of God’s people in one spiritual organism; it is the Bride of Christ, which He is preparing so that it may be presented to Him without blemish at the wedding feast of heaven; it is the Sacrament of God’s love in the midst of the world.
These images are all glorious. And true.
But the Church is also a Pilgrim People, and this side of heaven, life in the Church is also life in exile. This should not surprise us; the story of Israel as told in Scripture demonstrates at nearly every turn that exile is a kind of pattern for living as God’s people after the Fall. This pattern is first seen with Adam and Eve heading East out of Eden into primordial banishment; it appears again in Genesis 11 when God frustrates the designs of the nations to make themselves a high tower reaching even to heaven, and scatters them to the four winds; at the end of Genesis Jacob (Israel) and all his children are received with esteem in Egypt, only to become enslaved and oppressed in this land so far from home.
The preeminent iteration of the exile pattern is the ransacking and deportation of the Southern Tribes of Judah in the sixth century BC, commonly referred to as the Babylonian Exile. The prophet Amos foretold the calamity, pronouncing the judgment of God upon Israel and Judah for rejecting His law, exploiting the poor and vulnerable, neglecting those in need, and engaging in idolatry (Amos 2:4-8). Amos warned them that God’s justice, previously leveled against Israel’s enemies to vindicate them as God’s chosen people, would now be turned back upon them with doubled force:
“And on that day,” says the Lord God,
“I will make the sun go down at noon,
and darken the earth in broad daylight.
I will turn your feasts into mourning,
and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth upon all loins,
and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son,
and the end of it like a bitter day. (Amos 2:9-10)
Yes, something is about to happen that is going to make life very different for Israel. Their apparently good fortune is about to run out and with it will suddenly disappear all Israel’s worldly comfort and social privileges. Mourning in place of joy.
We should note here that while the chastisement of God as anticipated by Amos’ prophecy has an obvious material dimension (violence, the destruction of the Temple, deportation into Gentile lands, etc.) there is also a spiritual dimension to this exile. Amos continues,
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine on the land;
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord,
but they shall not find it. (Amos 2:11-12)
Israel, chosen from among all the nations to be the special object of God’s favor, presence, and protection - who generation after generation had received the Word of the Lord through Moses and the prophets - would now instead know only God’s silence. Becoming accustomed to God’s Word, they began to ignore it; now their ears would ring with its absence. They would long for the days when He used to speak to them freely; they would call out to Him in desolate anguish, but there would be no reply. No Temple, no priests, no sacrifice. Strangers in a strange land, engulfed by divine abandonment.
We see the same theme repeated in Hosea, a contemporary of Amos:
Therefore I will hedge up her [Israel’s] way with thorns;
and I will build a wall against her,
so that she cannot find her paths.
She shall pursue her lovers,
but not overtake them;
and she shall seek them,
but shall not find them. (Hosea 2:7-8)
The words of these pre-exilic prophets show that by handing Israel over to their enemies, by permitting the destruction of the Temple, and by allowing them to be led out of their land and into exile, God isn’t just inflicting a punishment on His people; more profoundly, he is withdrawing the comfort of His presence, leaving Israel to grapple with a hunger incapable of being satisfied with anything else. They are now left to struggle with the reality of who they really are: a people on whom the hand of the Lord has come to rest, a people indelibly marked and reduced to utter dependence on the One who has loved them, as an infant to his mother, as a lover to her beloved.
A fragrance lingers, a voice faintly remembered, but the Presence itself is gone. This is the suffering of exile.