Denial ain't just a river...

...in Egypt.

(Nile River in Egypt)

I first heard this joke from my brother when I was a teenager. Good jokes never get old.

It has now been a few years since 2020- one of the hardest years a good number of us have ever had. Maybe you found yourself, as many people did, reduced to living in sheer survival mode way more than you had anticipated. I know several people for whom it was the worst year of their lives. A year like 2020 has the ability to bring all kinds of spiritual/emotional junk to the surface... junk that we would rather leave buried beneath the surface. 

It's easier to just live in denial- a preferred defense mechanism against all that junk- which allows us to avoid the scary task of facing ourselves, our fears, and the pain we have accumulated. If you've done any work with grief, you know that denial is usually at the front end of that process. We deny our own pain/darkness regularly, choosing instead to "tough it out" or numb it with some sort of distraction that serves to medicate the pain. Then we tell ourselves a certain story about it, one that makes us feel good about where we are and how things are going. It's the ego's natural way of protecting us and helping us survive. 

So let me ask you: what kinds of stories are you telling yourself about reality these days? These stories aren't usually something we are really thinking about. They just sort of form automatically and then we live them out. It often takes a significant disruption for us to step back and really examine the stories we live by...

2020 was difficult, but it was not the worst season of my life. About 15 years ago I began to enter into a season of significant spiritual darkness, a "dark night of the soul," as it has been called since the mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote about his experiences in the 16th century. When I say "spiritual darkness," I mean several things, but it included losing the felt presence/experience of God, being unable to read or believe anything in the Bible without serious doubts, questioning everything I had learned in church, finding prayer to be an impossible waste of time, and seriously wondering if God even existed. I became a closet atheist for a short time, and I had a significant amount of anger and pain that I had suppressed for years. There's a lot more to it, and maybe I'll get into that another time.

Anyway, I remember how that season came to me, unannounced and uninvited, and how fierce my denial was. Because it was such a scary, unwanted, unwelcome, unknown, unexplained, and seemingly catastrophic thing to face, I denied it with all the strength I could muster. I pretended things were fine. I tried everything in my spiritual toolbox to make it go away. I told myself that my faith really was working out just fine, and that soon it would all go back to normal.

After all, I couldn't for the life of me understand why it was happening or even what was happening. I just knew I had somehow entered into a space where nothing I had previously relied on made any sense anymore. This was an especially difficult predicament because I was a ministry leader by vocation, and I was supposed to be helping other people in their faith journeys. That's hard to do when your own faith feels like it is falling apart, but again, I don't remember even really being conscious of all that. I was just living with a lot of denial, and I kept shoving it all down beneath the surface. It's really hard to even put it into words- it was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and it wouldn't go away. I thought for a while it must be spiritual attack from the evil one, but no matter how much I prayed, read my Bible, etc., it wouldn't change.

The most difficult part of that season lasted about 7 years, and at times it was extremely terrifying, dark, and painful. I even began to scapegoat others as the problem, because it's much easier to blame others than to face yourself and own your baggage. I had a terrible nagging sense that everything I had believed about God was a lie. At times I began to believe God had rejected me and that I was what some of my Calvinist friends call a "reprobate"- someone God had supposedly decided to reject before I was even born (what an awful thing to believe!). I was pretty sure God hated me, even though I had known and experienced God's love and grace to the degree that I had given my life to vocational ministry. But even though deep down I was wrestling with all these dark things, I kept telling myself everything was fine-- my denial was fierce. I had a deep seated, unconscious belief that to be honest about the darkness would be my total undoing. 

I was right. But I was also wrong.

It was a total undoing, but it was also a new beginning.

We can live in denial for many, many years. There's no shame in this- it is often an unconscious reaction that we don't even recognize. We often condition ourselves to believe a preferred story that keeps us from acknowledging the truth. But there comes a time when we begin to see our patterns, our denial, and the holes in our preferred stories-- and then we have choices to make. 

It can be pretty sobering to realize how deep the river of denial can be. Eventually though, you either have to face it head on and deal a death blow to your ego in order to start healing, or double-down on a narrative that is completely false and live dissociated from your true self, which is the path of spiritual death. When Jesus said, "Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it" (Luke 17:33), he was revealing the true pattern of growth and transformation. The way to life is through death and resurrection. You only get resurrection after a death. What feels like the worst thing is not the last thing, but the path to the new thing. Birthing processes are painful, yet that is how new life arrives.

Emily Dickinson once said, "Dying is a wild night and a new road." 

At some of the darkest points of that season, I remember feeling helpless and certain that my life was going to crumble. The river of my denial was drying up and I had run out of ego stories that helped me believe things were fine. It was time to face the darkness head on, to be honest about what I actually believed and feared, and let the chips fall wherever they fell. As silly as it sounds, it was a Morpheus moment where the red pill and the blue pill were in front of me, and I had finally chosen the red pill to see how deep the rabbit hole would go. I didn't really expect my faith to recover, and I had no idea where I would end up. I just knew I couldn't live in denial anymore.

You have to understand- I grew up in the Christian faith, going to a good church, with a very positive experience overall. I loved how my faith had given me identity, purpose, mission, family, friends, and especially God. I loved God! I loved Jesus and had met him very personally. I was not looking for a reason to leave it all behind or go live a life of self-centeredness and sin, as some critics might think. 

These days there's a term called "deconstruction" that's used for experiences like mine. It became somewhat trendy in the last few years to talk about things people are deconstructing in their lives, often referring to previous beliefs or faith identities. Matt Chandler, a megachurch pastor, famously said that people are deconstructing their faith because it's "sexy." Well, not for me. When I was going through the thick of this dark night of the soul, it was not trendy and I felt completely alone. There was nothing sexy or desirable about it. And besides, it wasn't something I chose to do as if I had some sort of control over it. Deconstruction, at least the kind I went through, is something that happens to you whether you want it to or not. Most people I know who have gone through a similar dark night experience would never choose it- it's not fun at all. It was a multi-faceted death experience.

And I later learned it was an identification with the suffering of Christ. What I did not expect at that time was that I would be able to look back on all of it with the gratitude and perspective that I do now. A lot has changed. A lot has healed. A lot has died. A kind of resurrection happened in my internal world. I haven't "arrived" at anything, but my path is different and my faith is more settled than it has ever been. But I don't want to give the impression that things basically went back to how they were, because they didn't and I don't think that's possible unless I decide to live in that Egyptian river I've been referring to. The dark night fundamentally changed how I see, and there are some things that, once you see, you can't un-see.

Some will read that last paragraph and immediately label me as "woke" or some such nonsense. It's okay if you don't understand what I'm talking about. I'm not going to get sidetracked with today's political commentary on "wokeness" and whatever that may mean to people. All I will say is that this season of the dark night has nothing to do with that.

Contrary to my initial feelings and denial about the dark night experience, I now see it as a work of transformation that God was pleased to do in me. I could write a long narrative about what all that means, but fundamentally I met God at the bottom of the darkness in a way that I never would have expected. 

"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there... ...If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you." -Psalm 139:7-12

A lot of my internal fear was healed- fear I didn't even realize I had. It was dwelling in my unconscious mind, sitting just beneath the surface of my awareness, and I was good at keeping it there. But it was obliterated by an encounter with the love of God in the darkest depths of my despair. "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment..." -1 John 4:18

Jesus has already climbed down into the depths of our deepest darkness. At humanity's worst moment, as we unleashed our hatred toward the light of God, shouting "Crucify!", Jesus was shouting back, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do!" -Luke 23:34

And God embraced our worst malice and transformed it into the Mercy Seat.

 

"Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day..." 

My dark night of the soul/deconstruction experience was awful, but it also turned into an experience of union with Christ. Again, I didn't "arrive" at anything, and the reconstruction process is ongoing. There's a part of me that is still hesitant to even write about this experience because, well, denial ain't just a river in Egypt. And words just fail, really, to describe it adequately. I started writing this piece a few years ago, but couldn't find words to finish it then. Plus, there are some people I know who I'm pretty sure will not see a "dark night experience" or "deconstruction" as a good thing. But when I was in the thick of it, I kept wondering if other Christians had experienced something like it. I didn't know how to even talk about it- I couldn't find the right language at the time. I kept asking myself why more people don't talk about this kind of thing more often, 'cause it would sure be helpful to know you're not alone in an experience where one feels more alone than ever. 

Even though "deconstruction" has become a bit of a hot topic in the last few years, it is often referring to something other than what I experienced. Anytime something goes mainstream and people begin jumping on the bandwagon, it usually morphs into all kinds of variants and often gets hijacked by some religious or political agenda, bearing little to no resemblance to its initial meaning. That's fine, and I'm really not interested in culture wars. But in my professional life, I have encountered many, many people who have shared an experience like mine and there are probably many more who have kept it a secret.

So that is why I have written about this. Maybe it will be helpful to someone to know that this kind of thing happens more often than we think, that many are either too scared or too confused to talk about it, and that some of God's greatest work happens in the dark. If you're in the thick of it, there is hope and a way forward, and I believe God is faithfully working in ways we can't possibly imagine. 

I'm guessing there will be more dark nights ahead, but I think I will approach them differently next time.