In Muted Praise of Deconstruction
O Lover,
In this my late autumn assorted oppositional tensions (e.g., paradoxes and dialectics, ironies and seeming oxymorons) are surfacing with greater frequency. In retrospect, life is shown to be an oscillation between negation and affirmation, perception and reality, the status quo and the veiled horizon. Nowhere has this tension been as prevalent as with religiosity in general, my ever-changing camíno into You in particular. The Jesus tradition is replete with allusions to this situation. Matthew’s Gospel (23:2-4) comes to mind where Jesus accuses the scribes and Pharisees, caretakers of the proliferation of proscriptions of the Torah said to total 613 commandments, of placing heavy burdens upon others rather than sharing their load. Or Pope Leo’s homily on Good Shepherd Sunday (Jn 10:1-16) in which he declared that church leaders must be “channels rather than filters,” enablers rather than obstructing gatekeepers, of Your bounty. In both cases the appeal is that exclusionary historical accretions be stripped away in favor of opening wide the gate of Your fold. Such stripping away constitutes but one aspect of a larger pattern I call deconstruction.
This theme thus understood has been a long and often painful journey for me. My origins and early formation, characterized by inerrant biblical literalism, exclusionary salvation, and a predisposition for the static over the dynamic, made it difficult to pass through what I would later come to view as natural stages of development. Construction, whether of words, images or systems, must remain open to reconstruction, and betwixt is the oft-painful yet necessary deconstruction. The ubiquity of the negation pole in cosmogenesis, the planet’s food chain, and individual human experience and mortality undercuts any denial of the reality of deconstruction. Yet, this trekker has found the immutability mindset hard to shake.
Nowhere has the challenge of this tension been as pronounced as in how I view, characterize and name You, O Lover. A sampler of my questions would include the following: How do I graciously acknowledge, and yet allow You to draw me beyond, aspects of my historical religious heritage which no longer move me toward greater consciousness of You? How can I become more aware of the cosmic scale of Your Christ’s Incarnation, Resurrection, and Epiphany encompassing all which You have, and will yet, grace with being? How do I move from a theistic perception of You—replete with objectification, antiquated anthropomorphism, and deism-drift—to one less inadequately pointed toward by terms like unítas indistinctiónis, panéntheistic, interfusion and coterminous? How do I sing Your song in a deconstructing land (Ps 137:4)? Am I able to embrace the self-immolating trajectory of American exceptionalism as also a way station toward Your larger vision yet unseen? In the present crisis, how do I continue to move from loving You primarily as an “other” to resting within the interpenetration of Your lavish Love?
All of the above set the stage for my initial mid-life encounter with the apophatic (“without images”) impulse. I have experienced this theme to be a gestalt for navigating what is more journey than destination. While affirming my simplistic kataphatic origins without judgment, it provides a channel via which this trekker continues to be drawn into the ineffable and indescribable where the remaining images of You are self-negating (e.g., darkness, emptiness, silence, solitude, fire) and serve as fences against idolatry. The via apophática is less shocked by decay and loss, less vulnerable to lack of rationality and certitude, more nearly in harmony with the undemarcability of You, O Lover. Jesus the Christ in the Synoptics repeatedly models this openness to fresh characterizing of You and Your works where the old wineskins are no longer serviceable. In short, the apophatic stance, including the death of the “gods,” is, at least for some of us, a survival mode for mortal life shot through with the deconstructive.
Summary query: do I trust You enough, O Lover, to allow my feeble yet precious constructs of You and what You have wrought to die?
