On Deconstruction II

The Stories We tell

I originally wrote the first part of this reflection for the Word From Below at Street Psalms. The second section is the continuation of an earlier post On Deconstruction.

My oldest was looking at the clouds and saw the light coming through. “Look,” she said, “There is God.” So we took a picture of God

The Stories We tell

The parable of the talents (Mt. 25:14-30) has haunted me for a long time. It has frightened me since I was a teenager. I remember hearing the youth pastor preaching about this passage several times. Every time he brought this parable up, I felt uncomfortable. I believed I had not been given anything, and the story was quite clear: “Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” I worried I did not have a talent to multiply. Consequently, I would be like the servant who is thrown into the darkness. The Idea was quite simple. You either have the talent to multiply what God has given you, or you will be deemed worthless and thrown out to the darkness.

The more I heal from violent theologies, the more I realize how silly and cruel this was. I was caught in a system that relied on the narrative and perception of the third servant to keep me and others under control and fear.

In the parable of the talents, Jesus is presenting us with three possible narratives. First, we see the generosity of a master who is willing to entrust his wealth to his servants. Secondly, we see two servants who trust their master so deeply that they are willing to risk failure in making a profit for him. Thirdly, we have a frightful servant who has a distorted image of his master. What this leads me to believe is that Jesus may be extending an invitation to his audience, and to us of course. The invitation is to review what kind of stories we are telling ourselves about God and ourselves. Just as Shekhar Kapur said: “we are the stories we tell ourselves.”

In this story, the third servant said: “I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.” What I wonder is, why did the other servants seem to have a different perception of their master? Could it be that they knew the truth to be different?

As a result, the master responds to the “wicked” servant in the same way the servant spoke. in other words, the servant created a reality that would throw him out into the darkness. If Shekhar Kapur is right about the stories we tell ourselves, then God is also the stories we tell about God. In other words, God is as bad and angry as we make God to be.

Today, I can only look back with compassion to the teenager I was. I need to comfort him as he is still part of who I am becoming. I lived into the story I internalized and repeated about God. And, the story brought pain and sorrow. For that reason, I am trying to believe the narrative of a God whose generosity and love is completely other to us. I am trying to relax in the process of becoming more human like Jesus, who revealed to us a God who is in rivalry with nothing and nobody. The process is far from complete. The Angry God narrative is still very present in my life. I can only hope and pray that it loses a little bit of power and validity one day at a time.

Deconstruction

Now that I look back on what I wrote last year, I can’t help but think about a conversation on deconstruction that I am having with my friend

Lyle Enright

. Deconstruction is not just about linguistics. It is about the narratives that have held us for a long time. That is why Kapur’s idea of being the stories we tell ourselves and deconstruction go hand in hand.

Theology is a narrative, at least it has a narrative framework. Remember the creation, fall, redemption framework? It is a story. And the way we tell that story sustains a belief in a very specific kind of deity. Now, if theology is a narrative, and we say that we live by the narrative of scripture, our interpretation of scripture becomes a way of justifying the narrative and our behavior. In other words, we need to create theologies that justify our violence and exclusion. It is not the other way around.

That is why I have come to believe that deconstruction happens when a narrative can no longer sustain us. The interpretation of the written word dies. It does not have any meaning left. It is words on a sacred text that became an Idol. Thereby, as the story of evangelical Christianity loses and betrays its own reading of the word, it needs to be deconstructed.

As I keep thinking and exploring, I agree more and more with Karl Barth. The Bible contains the word of God, and it becomes the word of God (couldn’t find the right book to cite, and I was behind my deadline to put this out). Therefore, could it be that deconstruction is the breaking of the narratives which became the idols/gods that asked for the exclusion and sacrifice of the most vulnerable? Perhaps, the destruction/deconstruction of violent narratives and theological systems is the very presence of God in Christianity. In the words of C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed.

Images, I must suppose have their use or they would not have been so popular. To me however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great Iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.