More Shadow Than Statue

When I sit down to write this newsletter, I’m not really sure what will come out. I chew on the cud of my current life and see what clumps together. How is the world speaking back to me, I think, and what is it saying? What I typically end up with is a slew of new questions rather than definitive answers, which is the exact theme that’s clinging to my psyche right now.

DECONSTRUCTION.

If you consider yourself an “exvangelical,” then this word probably rings a shrill bell in your brain, but I’m not just talking about the dismantling of westernized, evangelical Christianity. I’m also talking about the literal deconstruction of a house, car, or body, the arduous journey of trauma recovery, and the ways that writing can reconstruct the ruins. So, get comfortable and pour a bourbon (or your preferred equivalent), because these thoughts have morphed into a mini memoir.

This past summer, my husband and I discovered signs of water damage along the baseboards and vanity of our downstairs bathroom. There was no obvious indication of where the leak was coming from, but we suspected it was somewhere inside the wall. It took over a month to get a plumber out to our house, and another two days for him to find the culprit: a single nail that had pierced the AC drainage pipe during construction of our house several years ago. One nail, silently rusting and leaking over three years, yielding thousands of dollars of water damage. When my husband told a friend about the event, his friend asked, “So, is this a metaphor?” To which my husband said, “No, this actually happened.” But now, here I am, turning it into a metaphor.

During the same week that contractors pieced our bathroom back together, I got in a car accident. A driver turned left into oncoming traffic, and by the time I saw her and slammed on the brakes, it was too late. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for the best. The world went black for a second, the impact like a million guns blasting at the same time. When I opened my eyes, the airbag was deflated and smoking. I gathered myself enough to pull out of the intersection and call 911, and when I got off the phone with the dispatcher, I was sobbing, adrenaline and shock catching up with my emotions. Thank God the only casualties were the cars. My Honda Pilot, named Pearl, was towed away and is currently suspended in the air by a hydraulic lift, her insides exposed and engine gutted so mechanics can repair her fractured frame. It will still be a few months before I get her back. My neck muscles still remember the whiplash.

I’ve been on the phone with USAA more in the past two months than in my entire life combined. I’ve memorized the little jingle they play when I’m placed on hold. I’ve become acquainted with the inner parts of my house and car in ways I never really wanted to. I’ve witnessed deconstruction in obvious, tactile ways: a literal breakdown of the whole into its parts, surveying each factor, isolating the leaky, moldy, or fractured pieces that need repair or total replacement.

***

I frequently ask my students to pay attention to what they are reading because our book choices often provide windows into our deepest desires and interests—those things we’re seeking, the subjects or characters we relate to, even on a subconscious level. I decided to take my own advice and laughed out loud when I saw how the array of books on my desk mirrored the theme of deconstruction, only this time, in the realm of faith. Each of the authors had written a narrative involving a relentless pursuit of truth and selfhood after a damaging immersion in fundamentalist or cultish Christian sects. This quest required some of them to leave the groups or institutions they’d once been a part of, and the secondary loss of their community was its own kind of devastation, sometimes even worse than the primary injury.

I’m drawn to these kinds of narratives because of the ways they mirror my own. For years, I’ve been writing toward the core of my story, getting closer to the fracture within myself left in the wake of religious and sexual trauma. The journey started with writing small, fragmented scenes and grew as I started identifying the same pattern running through all of them, which revealed an entire narrative of shame written within my flesh. The belief that I was bad, depraved, and guilty––a common residual malignancy of trauma––was compounded and amplified by the evangelical doctrines I learned from groups in high school and beyond––groups that encouraged me to bury my own intuition for the sake of the gospel (or a dysfunctional ministry), sometimes in deceptively subtle ways. Less of me and more of You was a common lyric sung in worship songs, as though God and human selfhood couldn’t coexist. Abandoning yourself to God is easy when trauma has already taught you to loathe yourself. Becoming a good Christian girl was one way I thought I could nullify my shame, but in fact, it merely compounded it, setting me up for further manipulation and complicity if I wanted to remain in the system.

Last week, I taught a writing workshop for the Wounded Warrior Project. We did writing prompts, read poems, and discussed how trauma is not just what happens to you, but what happens inside of you. As physician and author Gabor Maté writes, “Trauma is a lasting rupture or split within the self due to hurtful events. It’s what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves.” Yes, the initial insult is damaging, but far more destructive is the insidious way it roots inside of us, its invisible tentacles of shame, rage, guilt, or self-loathing penetrating every aspect of life. The problem is that the core lies behind a veil, a wall, or layers of tissue and skin. It’s not just the visible water damage and the black mold growing along the baseboards. It’s the rusted nail inside of you, the one you didn’t know was there, the split in the self that’s difficult to locate, the one we’d rather avoid at all costs...until the cost gets too high. The real healing work––that of deconstruction––must address the source, not just the soggy drywall. It must, God forbid, involve exposure.

In human terms, finding the source is not as simple as locating one penetrating nail. The work is slow and emotionally brutal. The process reminds me of my first day in the operating room as a nursing student, when the surgeon was performing a breast reconstruction on a patient who'd undergone a double mastectomy. She had the BRCA gene, and though the malignancy had only been identified in one breast, both were removed as a preventive measure. She’d also gone through several rounds of chemotherapy to treat any unseen malignancy that had spread like spores through her body. Cancer can present in a hard, identifiable mass, but it can also run undetected through blood or lymph or your own genetic code, passed down through untraceable ancestry. By the time the patient got to the reconstruction part of the journey, her body had been ravaged. It was the plastic surgeon’s job to reconstruct her breasts upon the site of former ruin, but nothing could be done, of course, until the cancer had been exposed and removed. As I watched the surgeon and his nurse fill the saline implants, restoring the anatomy our patient had lost, I realized that this was an art form, that the human body was functional but also beautiful, and there were ways to reconstruct beauty from places ravaged by trauma. This wasn’t just a restoration of flesh. They were stitching integrity and dignity back into her skin.

I used to assume that deconstruction meant the same thing as destruction, but it doesn’t. Rather than total demolition, deconstruction breaks down the parts of a whole, analyzing each factor and exposing the unstable, arbitrary, or downright toxic aspects bound to a religion, system, relationship, or person. With deconstruction, the goal, hopefully, is to restore the person or thing to its healthy and whole state. I realized that this is what the writing and revision process is like. For me, writing in conjunction with therapy became my way of stitching myself together again. Getting the damage out on the page, in plain black and white, was like a CT scan lighting up diseased tissue. Self-exposure is part of a memoirist’s job, and once I could see the source of the lies, I could excise them, one word at a time. I could see the real story and assemble from the ruins a work of word-art. The best part is that the creative process taught me to listen to my intuition again, that voice deeply rooted in the true self, the voice I thought I needed to obliterate in order to be good and accepted by others. As it turns out, this voice that is most me is the one that also sees and hears God. It didn’t need to be repressed...it needed to be loved and given a safe space to finally speak.

Deconstruction and reconstruction are an ongoing journey, a perpetual evolution. I still have triggers. There are still particular Bible verses that pelt my reptilian brain with rocks, and on the few occasions I go to church, I often retreat to a bathroom stall to avoid parts of the service. Certain worship songs elicit either rage or panic, and I’ve donated or thrown away some of my old theology books from which I used to ingest a heavy diet. I’m talking to you, Oswald Chambers. I’m constantly struggling with how to teach my kids about God without indoctrinating them into something harmful. Perhaps, on the outside, it looks like I’ve lost all faith, but I feel more wholly connected to the mystery of God and the good news that blessing, possibility, and vast creativity lies within our most ravaged, rejected, dejected, delinquent, and shadowy states.

***

Last month, on the night before my car accident, I went to my friend Heather’s house to celebrate my birthday. We drank wine, listened to records, and browsed her new bookshelves. I came across a poetry collection by Joe Salerno and opened it mid-book, serendipitously landing on a poem called “Poetry Is The Art of Not Succeeding.” As I read it, the song “Blessed” by Simon and Garfunkel––inspired by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount––crackled from the vinyl player. The lyrics of both poem and song aligned in perfect unity, and I had to laugh, because I knew that God, The Universe, the Energy That Connects all Life was converging and speaking back to me. Blessed are the meek...Blessed are sat upon, spat upon, ratted on...Blessed is the church service, makes me nervous. The art of poetry and the message of the gospel are more shadow than statue, as Salerno writes, and sadly seem to run in direct opposition to most tenets valued by the evangelical church. I’ve posted Salerno’s poem and other deconstruction-themed reading below, as well as a writing prompt.

I also wanted to say THANK YOU to the small and faithful group of friends and colleagues who read this newsletter, and if it offers encouragement or inspiration in any way, feel free to pass it along to others. Finally, feel free to “reply” to this email and share what resonates! Happy belated Thanksgiving to you all.

***

Poetry Is The Art of Not Succeeding

Poetry is the art of not succeeding;
the art of making a little ritual
out of your own bad luck, lighting a little fire
made of leaves, reciting a prayer
in the ordinary dark.

It’s the art of those who didn’t make it
after all; who were lucky enough to be
left behind, while the winners ran on ahead
to wherever it is winners
go running to.

O blessed rainy day, glorious
as a paper bag. The kingdom of poetry
is like this–quiet, anonymous,
a dab of sunlight on the back of your hand,
a view out the window just before dusk.

It’s an art more shadow than statue,
and has something to do with your dreams
running out–a bare branch darkening
on a winter sky, the week-old snow
frozen into something hard.

It’s an art as simple as drinking water
from a tin cup; of loving that moment
at the end of autumn, say, when the air
holds no more promises, and the days are short
and likely to be gray.

A bland light is best to see it in.
Middle age brings it to flower.
And there, just when you’re feeling your weakest,
it floods you completely,
leaving you weeping as you drive your car.

***

Reading Recommendations

If you are interested in further reading recommendations surrounding this theme, I suggest Pablo Neruda’s classic poem, “Ode to Broken Things,” and if you haven’t heard it already, listen to “Blessed” by Simon and Garfunkel. For a writing craft book, I recommend You Must Revise Your Life by William Stafford, and I particularly adore Marie Howe's poetry collection Magdalene.

I also suggest all of these books currently on my desk:

I adored This is My Body: A Memoir of Romantic and Religious Obsession by Cameron Dezen Hammon, which explores themes of desire, spirituality, love-addiction, and belonging. I deeply connected to her experience of the evangelical church and the subtle and obvious ways it asks women to be complicit in their own degradation. This book is a page-turner!

I’m currently loving Because We Were Christian Girls, a new-release fiction chapbook written by Virgie Townsend and published by Black Lawrence Press. Each chapter reads as part prose-poem, part short-story, with magical and humorous twists. She creatively captures fundamentalist Christian culture as her characters navigate its many abuses and strive for freedom.

Also, check out Evangelical Anxiety by Charles Marsh. Fun fact: Marsh was my friend Megan’s religious studies professor at UVA back in the early 2000s. His writing is intelligent, visceral, lyrical, and at times, hilariously disarming. He masterfully names the ways fundamentalist preaching instilled him with a suffocating sense of dread and anxiety. To experience the freedom he’s always longed for, he undergoes rigorous psychoanalysis and ventures into the shadows of his own psyche, emerging with a truer sense of self and a form of faith he can live with.

Uncultured by Daniella Mestyanek Young is another new-release memoir that chronicles a survivor’s escape from the Children of God cult, only to be sucked into another one: the U.S. Army. I love the connections she makes between the qualities of exploitive groups, something I’ve explored within my own life and writing.

Writing Prompt

What are you currently reading? What types of stories and characters are you drawn to? What do your preferences say about who you are and the message you have to express to the world?