I don’t know about y’all, but pandemic life is putting me in the position of looking in the dark nooks and crannies of my soul. It seems as if there are some piles of old hair and dust that need to be swept out of my subconscious and apparently, the time is now. One of the many things under reconstruction for me right now is the idea of a personal faith. Grad school really helped me become reacquainted with the idea of personal faith practices. I’m bolstered by having spiritual practices as part of my self-care and daily rhythms. What hasn’t quite integrated back into my faith life is the idea that I have a personal relationship with God that is specific and unique to me. Many cultures hold faith communally and it is certainly a western construct that Scripture or faith is specific to me and my circumstances. I remember how purposeful everything felt in my life when I thought God was working in all of it and also how panicky I felt when something shitty happened and I couldn’t create a story to justify its place in my life right away. So much of what I see in evangelicalism today about faith being personal really just reads as privilege and self-absorption to me.
In another corner of my spirit, I have been re-working and trying to rewrite some of the subconscious tapes I play in moments where I feel shame. This season has really highlighted my relationship with work and purpose. I struggle to feel worthy of love when I am not able to perform a lot of purposeful action. Perhaps this season is about loving myself while unemployed after grad school. I’m hopeful this time will help me unlink my productivity with my sense of identity (and the underbelly of unfulfilled identity patterns which manifest as shame) so that when I am able to work full-time once the kids are back in school I can have a healthy relationship with work and rest.
I had a weird and insightful moment with a friend recently. I was picking his brain about this personal relationship with God construct and it ended up becoming clear to me that it’s related to this specific in-between-the-ribs work I’m doing with shame and identity. Rather than these being two separate things going on with me, perhaps part of the work of the Spirit of God in my life is learning to tend to myself in these places of old narratives that generate harm. Perhaps part of my practice of a personal faith is tending to my spirit and well of energy. I’ve known for a long time that shame was not the voice of God. But by the time I started telling my shame to shut the fuck up, I had discarded the idea of a personal relationship with God. What if? What if this personal work I’ve been doing has been God’s work in my life?
I don’t personally need to stamp Jesus on everything to make it worthy or meaningful. If anything, it’s a little twitchy for me to call God back into this space with me or make unilateral public claims about what an Almighty Deity might be up to. I had to learn to trust myself and hear and develop my own voice before I could learn how to follow a faith with healthy boundaries. I don’t want to live a faith based on authoritarian allegiance. But what if there is another way to follow God? What if, the Spirit of God is with me as I journal these patterns out of my brain and as I validate my worthiness for rest? What if, after discarding the traditional female definition of self as only how I relate to others and God doesn’t mean that I can’t hold sacred my relatedness as well?
As usual, I am working on integration in an area where my brain has created a fraudulent either/or. Can I re-write old narratives and allow space for the possibility that God is involved in that sacred work? I think I can. I think I’m bound to find out in this season of tilling the soil of my soul.