REstory 7: Whale Sharks, Poisonous Platypus Barbs, and Repentance
Finding the Courage to Learn What We Don't Already Know
I’m starting off today by confessing something embarrassing. I was in my thirties with preschool aged children before I knew whale sharks existed. My kids were watching a Go Diego Go! DVD, and the animal featured in that episode was a whale shark, which I had never heard of before. You mean there is a big animal in the ocean with a grid pattern on its skin with dots inside the grid? It looked to me like an animal that a human would draw - it looked made up! And because I thought of myself as a smart adult, as I passed through the living room, I actually did not believe what I was seeing on the screen. I questioned my understanding of the premise of the show first before suspecting the possibility of my own ignorance (Wait, does the Diego show cover imaginary animals too??).
Of course, it didn’t take me long to Google whale sharks and learn that they are REAL. And if that’s not embarrassing enough, much more recently, in my early forties, one of my kids mentioned that platypuses have poisonous ankle barbs, and again I did not believe them. It sounded ridiculous, and I thought they were pulling my leg and trying to get me to believe something that wasn’t real. Funny enough, they had also learned that information from another cartoon (Phineas and Ferb), and again I didn’t believe it until I had checked for myself.
These are lighthearted (yet true) examples of something that can sometimes be quite serious: learning something in adulthood that we don’t already know. So far in this REstory series we have been wrestling with weighty questions like what is God like and the possibility that too many churches are teaching mistaken medieval atonement theories as the Gospel. But so much of our ability to learn our way into a larger story with God depends on whether or not we’ve been taught to expect that kind of large learning later in life. Are we open to being surprised, or not?
The terms deconstruction and reconstruction have been used for several decades now in post-evangelical conversations to describe many people’s experiences of dismantling wrong or incomplete religious ideas and looking for healthier ones. (It’s a much more recent shift where these terms have been co-opted as derogatory labels by folks with interests in conserving institutional power).1 However, it is normal for some unlearning to happen before relearning. Please don’t let the sneers of those holding the power to form your expectations and definitions for these categories.
Fear is another reason the terms deconstruction and reconstruction have become like the boogeyman. When friends or loved ones have walked away from faith describing their experience with those words, some people then assume the root of the problem is the deconstruction. However, they don’t realize that it’s more complex than that. When church leaders withhold or avoid rich and robust resources for reconstruction (rethinking complex and valid questions about atonement and hermeneutics, for example), then walking away is a move of integrity for many people, and the accountability for that loss should be assigned to the church leaders who weren’t doing the heavy lifting.
Everyone in the world has benefited from the deconstructing of wrong ideas and the reconstructing of healthier ideas. Jesus was a master at this. Think about all the times he said things like: “You have heard it said, but I tell you…” or “repent (change your mind), the Kingdom of God is at hand.” And there are other great examples. From Galileo’s sun-centered cosmology to physicians being made to wash their hands between patients to seat belts in cars to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, everyone is already benefiting from people who have changed their minds. So why is it so hard in religion and faith spaces? If you had an appointment with a doctor and they said “We’re doing things the exact same way we were doing it fifty years ago because it was fine for people then,” you would have concerns about the integrity and ethics of their practice. Why do we not embrace a growth and exploration mindset in church spaces as well?
I think it’s tricky when we aren’t expecting to change our minds. Not enough churches have formed people to expect to change their minds in adulthood. When this is true, unprepared adults may not even listen to something unfamiliar or that doesn’t confirm what they already know, causing deep grief in their communities. However, they’re wrong. We should expect to be learning together in joy for our entire lives.
One helpful framework describes the trajectory of multigenerational learning as Chaos—Order—Questioning—Mystery. I want to emphasize that these “stages of spiritual growth” are not a checklist. It’s not even a roadmap, but more like a field guide to give shape to our expectations.2
First is Chaos. Some people have seasons in their lives characterized by chaos — this could be dysfunction or abuse or neglect in their earlier lives and relationships, or just a sense that life isn’t working. Then when they find a church or a support group or a stable community that gives structure to their lives, they find their way into Order. This stage is structured with rules, obedience, certainty, and clear doctrine. Coming out of Chaos into Order can feel kind of like salvation, and some people will spend their whole lives in Order.
Eventually, though, in the next season or the next generation, some cracks in the foundation begin to show. Maybe they discover that the promoted doctrine and practice were incoherent, or maybe they realize that those leading the organization lack integrity, but either way some people enter into a period of Questioning. The realizations that what was advertised as air tight and secure actually has holes and is leaking leads to a season of disorientation. Some folks who leave Order feel like they have been lied to, that trust has been broken, and that questions are the only thing they can be honest about. The move in biblical wisdom literature from Proverbs (do good and good will happen) to Ecclesiastes (the gray areas are confusing, complex, and require nuance) resembles this move from Order to Questioning.
Some people stay in Questioning a long time, but some find their way into Mystery. Transitioning from Questioning into Mystery teaches people to expect complexity and make peace with the risks of life with some unanswered questions. Within the example of wisdom literature, this might correlate with moving from Ecclesiastes to Job. People in Mystery develop more humility and realize that the best questions will always lead to further questions. They begin to inhabit paradox and learn to look for deeper transformation and wisdom, realizing with increasing joy that they will not arrive at the end of questioning in their lifetime.3
It’s important to emphasize that many people experience moving from one stage to the next as a salvation experience and often describe it with the vocabulary of conversion. Additionally, in this framework, people will have the most frustration with others (and previous versions of themselves!) who are still in whatever stage they just left. Some folks spend their whole life in just one stage, leaving it to their children or grandchildren to continue this growth in the next generation.
Obviously, growth is often gradual, and there is no certificate for moving between stages; you won’t get a t-shirt saying “I have moved from Order to Questioning!” Often we have a foot in two spaces, and we might go back and forth for a season. Also, people need different kinds of help in different seasons. Much more could be said here, but for example, people in Chaos need friends and resources and safety, people in Order need teachers and mentors and prophets, people in Questioning need listeners and coaches, and people in Mystery need companions and sages and poets.
Participating in other people’s growth requires compassion and sensitive discernment. My husband tells a story of wanting to show a caterpillar in a cocoon to our girls when they were young. However, he made the critical mistake (and he might say cruel mistake) of “helping” the caterpillar out of the cocoon just a tiny bit. It was taking so long, and it looked like it needed just a little help, but of course things went badly, and the caterpillar didn’t survive its transformation into a butterfly. We must be patient with people in the stages that they are in.
However, this is not to say that urgency is always inappropriate. We know from the Hebrew prophets and from the ministry of Jesus that many people have refused to grow past what they already know, and their neglect is harming the people of God.
Going back to the caterpillar analogy, with humans it is possible for the cocoon to become a couch when people refuse to stay engaged in the process of transformation. Jesus is a model for us here too, when we contrast his instructive interaction with the confused Nicodemus in John 3 and his stern lecture with murderous religious leaders in John 5. With compassion, we need to BOTH cultivate patience for the learning of others AND we need to insist that leaders must be learners. There is no preacher, teacher, elder, dean, professor, CEO, president, director, or administrator who is exempt from the discomfort of learning what they don’t already know. Fear is not a strategy; fear should not keep leaders on the couch neglecting the healthy deconstruction and reconstruction required for transformation.
I want to mention again that this is not a to-do list to script your trajectory. This is not a checklist where if you focus really hard on the homework you can skip a stage or rush through it — it doesn’t work that way. Instead, this framework is meant to be descriptive of human reality and therefore to normalize the experience of these stages. When this trajectory of transformation is normalized, people will expect it.
Then, instead of rejecting or punishing those in their community who are pointing to what needs to grow, people can be trained to look for the work of God beyond the edges of what they can’t yet imagine.
And really, this framework of Chaos—Order—Questioning—Mystery is just one example framework of describing transformation trajectories; people have been talking about this for a long time. For example, in the last century, the French philosopher Paul Ricouer talks about the stages as a first naivete, and then critical distance, and then a second naivete. More recently, in Brian McLaren’s book Naked Spirituality, he uses seasonal metaphors for growth (summer= simplicity, fall=complexity, winter=perplexity, and spring=harmony), and he pairs each stage with breath prayers that are useful in those stages. So even though he's using different terms, you can see how they could overlap with Order, Questioning, and Mystery. These examples describe the transformation of expectations that happens for individuals and groups on a learning trajectory. (Check the footnote for even more resources for expansive spiritual growth).4
Learning the history of thought and faith in one’s own community and in others’ is usually a gateway practice to expanding our expectations and realizing “Wait! We don’t already have it all figured out!” History gives the context for all our incomplete ideas (and they are ALL incomplete), and so history can keep us humble! Which brings me to repentance.
The word for repentance in New Testament Greek is metanoia. We often think that the word repentance means remorse or sorrow about personal sin, especially right before conversion. But in the lexicon for first century Greek, if you look up metanoia, both the noun and the verb forms, the primary definition is to change your mind, to think again, to think after. The remorse about sin that comes before conversion, that’s the secondary definition of that word.5
The primary definition of repentance, the most common usage, is to change your mind, to think after, to think again. Repentance is required for learning!
And of course, humility is required before the repentance of changing our minds. This is the repentance that church leaders should be modeling week in and week out.
We’re already familiar with the cognitive dissonance that causes us to question something that doesn’t make sense, whether at home or at work or among our friends; we know this is a normal part of life. Churches should be teaching people to expect to change their minds about God and faithful life before God (instead of shaming people for “doubt” or sneering at “deconstruction.”) Deconstruction is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong but instead is a sign that God is at work. Like growing pains or labor pains, they are a normal part of human growth and life. Conversely, ministers or elders who do not prepare people for this normal growth will be hindering the development of the people in their care. Healthier churches will have elders who are modeling deconstruction of incomplete ideas and reconstruction of healthier ideas with humility and joy. Healthier churches have elders who model repentance regularly!
Who knew something as amazing as a whale shark existed??? I didn’t. I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I was surprised by my own ignorance! And what a JOY to learn about such wondrous creatures like whale sharks! All our ideas about God are incomplete, and that’s not scary if God is like Jesus and we believe that we are good. If we believe that God is good, that we are loved, and that whatever we don’t understand about God is made clearer by Jesus, then we can more humbly admit our ignorance and more joyfully wrestle with healthy questions. We are loved into loving, and that is the healthiest posture for learning. Leaders who model repentance regularly will be helping people continually Go Out In Joy — growing out of small ideas and into larger views of God in every season. Those healthy leaders will help people expect to be surprised and to learn what they don’t already know about God.
Deconstruction originally comes from 20th century Continental philosophy and literary theory and is a reaction against structuralism; see Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article on Deconstruction.
My husband was introduced to a version of this framework through Greg Newton; it originally comes from M. Scott Peck’s stages of spiritual growth, which are found in his book Further Along the Road Less Traveled: The Unending Journey Towards Spiritual Growth, p. 119-134. One change we made was calling stage 4 Mystery instead of Mysticism since that term was confusing to some people.
Knowing that we’ll never exhaust all the questions is not to become an excuse to “sit on the fence” in order to not take a position in issues of justice. Living with Mystery can actually lead us to robust, courageous action in the world, while being aware that we do not have everything figured out.
In Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, he calls it the first half of life when the false self is in control, and then after we have done deep “shadow work” to heal our false selves, we enter into the second half of life when the true self is leading. Spiral Dynamics is another category of conversation about what expected expansion and growth looks like on culture and society levels. Going much further back, Teresa of Avila in the 16th century wrote about The Interior Castle as our experience with the Spirit of God grows our inner life layer by layer.
If you’d like to go deeper, The Critical Journey: Stages in the Life of Faith is an important resources that comes in for a much closer look than I’ve done above, distinguishing seven stages of spiritual growth. Much more recently, I’ve had Mansions of the Heart by Thomas Ashbrook recommended as even better that Critical Journey, but I haven’t read it yet - it’s on my wishlist :)
As mentioned above, Brian McLaren’s book Naked Spirituality: A Life With God in Twelve Simple Words is very accessible, and outside of church reading lists, philosopher Paul Ricoeur described these normal adult learning experiences.
See Danker/Bauer’s Greek/English Lexicon, p.640-41.