A Deconstruction Observed — Pt. 22
My Dark Moment
When I was studying the craft of fiction, hoping someday to write suspense/thriller novels, I learned about an essential part of this type of story: the dark moment. The dark moment is that part of a story or novel where everything looks hopeless and the protagonist is on the verge of giving up. It’s the proverbial darkest before the dawn part of the story.
I guess you could call this part of my story my dark moment.
As with most of my story I can’t pin down a precise chronology or sequence. But I’m guessing that this happened not long after I became convinced that the science of evolution wasn’t something constructed by nefarious “secular” scientists whose goal was to obstruct the truth of the Bible. Rather, that it was an accurate understanding of our world and how we came to be here.
It was when I came to the same conclusion that evangelical Christian author Janet Kellogg Ray states so perfectly in her recent book, The God of Monkey Science: “As the twenty-first century progresses, it is clear: evolution is not going away. Modern genetics sealed the deal.”
With my young-earth creationist background, I had been coached how to ignore or refute the fossil record, geology, astronomy, and a host of other scientific realities. But I had no vocabulary to address the clear evidence of genetics. The mapping of the human genome and virtually every other genome left no doubt in my mind. All living things are connected to one another in a way that I had not imagined possible. And the only explanation for those connections was evolution.
But once this realization sank in I found myself in a quandary.
And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t resolve it.
I was used to certainty, looking at the universe through what I understood was a “biblical” worldview. Now my worldview was collapsing around me because I had no categories for a universe that hadn’t been created ex nihilo in six twenty-four-hour days.
And I went into a tailspin.
TAILSPIN
The more I tried to resolve the conflict, the less resolution seemed possible and the more confused and disillusioned I became. The cognitive dissonance became so great that for a time I didn’t know what I believed anymore.
In February of 2020, when I was well along the path of reconstruction, I wrote to a friend:
“It’s been quite a journey (10 years!). At my lowest, there were times I wasn’t even sure God existed. A line … kept coming to my mind: ‘I stood on the edge of eternity and beheld only blackness.’ During that dark time, my prayer was, ‘God, please don’t let go of me. And don’t let me let go of you.’”
The darkness was never constant. Some days, bits of light and hope would break through like the sun sometimes peeking through overcast skies. Other days I would stand on that figurative ledge, looking out into blackness and wondering, “Are you still there, God? Were you ever there?
I don’t remember how long that period lasted, how often that line about standing on the edge of eternity went through my mind, or even how often I asked God to hold on to me during those dark moments. But it was quite a while.
And it was rough.
However, if you talked with me during this time, you would never have known about my struggle. As I wrote in another post, I was one of the silent ones. I was the person in the pew in front of you or behind you who put on a happy face and said that everything was fine while inside I was in turmoil, desperately clinging to a God I no longer was even certain existed.
Why didn’t I reach out? Why didn’t I tell someone?
I was afraid.
I’d been a pastor, and even when I wasn’t I’d been in some type of ministry my entire adult life. Now, in my mid-fifties and still involved in prison ministry, how could I show that kind of weakness? How could I admit publicly that I had doubts? Besides, I’d been in evangelicalism long enough to know that there’s some truth to the adage: “The Christian army is the only army that shoots its wounded.”
I wasn’t taking any chances. For better or worse, this was a road that I chose to walk alone.
TURNING POINT
When did the clouds break? When did I begin to see a tenuous light at the distant end of the dark forest?
When I allowed myself to consider the unthinkable.
What if there isn’t a god?
What if, as I gaze into a star-filled sky on a clear summer night, that that’s all there is? Just a universe. Random. Unfeeling. Inexplicable.
I returned to my love of astronomy, ironically the very thing that set me on this journey. I thought about the vastness of the universe, billions of galaxies filled with trillions of stars, and how infinitesimally small I was in comparison. I considered how the stars took hydrogen, the simplest of all elements, and through the interaction of fusion and gravity became factories that produced everything we see. And I allowed myself to wonder.
Not only did I look at the large picture; I also considered the smallest picture.
I have been fascinated by the weird, wonderful world of quantum physics for years. I don’t understand the math, but this unseen topsy-turvy micro world that seems to be governed by uncertainty never ceases to amaze me. How can an object be in two places at once? How can a change in one particle can affect another particle in a different location? How can matter exist both as a wave and a particle? And I wondered even more.
In the middle of the dark forest of deconstruction I contemplated the universe, vast and complex, yet mysterious on the micro level.
And I found God there, waiting for me.
TAKEAWAY
Calling this part of my journey a dark moment is a bit of a misnomer since it continued for many months if not a few years. This is the most dangerous part of the journey of deconstruction and it’s where many people walk away from their faith entirely.
If you’re in this part of your walk through the forest, don’t despair. You might be letting go of some beliefs you’ve held your whole life, but you don’t have to let go of God. You might not know it, feel it, or even want to acknowledge it, but he’s walking with you.
Remember the prayer: “God, please don’t let go of me; and don’t let me let go of you.”
He answered it in my life and he’ll answer it in yours.