I have been struck by the value of the work you’re doing and the integrity it takes to wrestle with something so hard for so many years…moving through different versions and seasons of resiliency.
I also want to challenge the feared conclusion you’ve arrived at.
You’re looking at the faith, the people, and the safety you felt at camp, and you’ve built this mechanical metaphor (better than the mechanical God you had before!) in your head: The literal theology was the fuel, the church was the engine, and the embodied love was the output. And because you feel like you've lost the 'fuel’ of literalism, you’re terrified the output is gone forever…if I’m understanding this piece, correctly?
But what if you have the physics of it backward?What if the literal theology wasn't the fuel? What if God Himself was the fuel, and the theology was just the imperfect map the camp counselors were using to try and describe Him? A map can have errors, and a map can become outdated as you grow, but the actual thing it’s pointing to doesn't cease to exist just because you set down the paper.
When those adults built that space for you, looked you in the eye, and shared a dinner table with you as a deeply dysregulated child, they weren't just completing a human program fueled by intellectual beliefs. They were sharing a real, objective, supernatural reality into your life (if you asks them, at least).
Maybe the safety you felt wasn't a placebo effect of human dogmas; it was a truer than true encounter with a Living God who met a traumatized boy exactly where he was…and continues to do that.
You are asking if that embodied reality is now forever out of your reach. But look at what you did this morning: you sat in your office, as a grown man, and you finally wept for that teenager. You gave him the permission to feel the grief he couldn't face back then. You provided the safe space for your own past self. *Where did you get the capacity to do that?*
The reality that held you at fifteen didn't vanish when your intellectual framework shifted.
The story of Jacob doesn’t end with a textbook of perfect theological answers. He walked away with a limp, a new name, and a blessing. It is okay that you can't hold the literal structures right now. God is big enough to be wrestled with. But don't let fear convince you that losing a specific way of believing means you have lost the God who built that dinner table.
I'm so glad you have decided to join the conversation and engage with my writing. I love that you wrote this as we sat together in the living room of our house across from one another. And I had to wait patiently for you to finish your thought so that we could talk more about this in person tonight.
But mostly I'm thankful for your willingness to engage in this wrestling with me, here online. I love your reframe. Maybe God was the actual fuel, not the literal theology, this whole time. That, my sweet wife, is what I am still hopeful could be true. 😘
Inchara, I'm really glad you were able to resonate with this piece. Thank you for sharing about it, I've read your essays and I know you gone through a very serious wrestling with God as well. Glad to have you join the conversation!
This is a beautiful story, Trevor. The dinner table was a pretty powerful metaphor. I love how honest your reflections are and can really relate to what you mean about the younger version of you needing things to be literally true. It feels much safer to look to someone else to hold certainty for us when we are living in chaos than to sit with more ambiguity. I will be publishing a piece in the next few days that talks about something similar in how I outsourced authority through religion and then materialism until I could feel safe enough within myself to be able to hold the complexity of the unknown without collapsing into it.
Thanks Brianna! I really like your comment about outsourcing certainty! It's the perfect description of what was going on as a 15 year old for me and its fits my central metaphor of my writing exactly.
This is a really powerful story ... All the more powerful because you refuse to draw any of the easy lines that people usually used to divide us. I've been thinking a lot lately but one of the great gifts of Christianity is that it offers something like a physics of love and compassion ... It shows us the counterintuitive ways that opening up to the outsider or the outcaste and truly loving them can reveal something divine to us .. in us ... In them. And it seems to me that thinking about "God" in this way that is more in tune with love and emotion might be a way of sidestepping the typical theological debates, and no less "true"
I love what you wrote, "something like a physics of love and compassion", I think that is spot on! That is what I was deeply reflecting on with Mary this morning as I shared with her my revelation through tears. It is the embodied reality experienced by a hurting individual that makes the faith so profound to me still. The reflection I was doing this morning centered on the complexity of how the literal and the symbolic are intertwined, and the importance of being careful about the danger of separating them for an individual who is hurting. I don't think 15-year-old Trevor could have sat with that ambiguity . He needed to know this was literally true, mostly through the embodied presence of the people who were living it out, but also because his mind had been rendered cynical and hardened by the trauma he had experienced . And only as a grown adult can he hold the space to let go of the literal. But I'm still wrestling with the reality of why he needed that. It seems to be a "truer than true" kind of thing.
I read this after responding to someone about emotions and how, if we view them as energy, we unintentionally leave pieces of them attached to different places, people, and moments. Then one of our senses catches something and suddenly we're transported back.
But I keep lingering on the question you asked:
"Can a faith that lets go of the literal still build a space where an isolated, frightened boy finds the comfort he found?"
Being careful with how I word this, because I welcome all religions and beliefs into my space, I wonder if what pulls us isn't religion itself, but the relationship.
The trust.
The hope.
The faith.
The relationship with something greater than ourselves that we can feel, hear, and experience, even if we cannot physically touch it.
I don't know if my words fully capture what I mean, but I wonder if the space is built and the comfort is found through that relationship more than the structure that introduced us to it.
I love this perspective, and I completely agree that the heart of what healed me was the relationship, the trust, and the hope.
I agree with your assessment about the embodied power of relationships. In the world we live in, that is the one tangible thing we can psychically point to.
Also, the deeper agonizing struggle I'm in still is why did it take a literal belief system to produce the reality of the relationships that it did? And if that belief was removed, would 15-year-old me have been able to survive the chaos of his childhood ? My gut tells me no. So I feel I owe honor to that literal belief, even if I can't hold it the same way I did back then . For a hurting child, that rigid scaffolding wasn't just a container for the relationship, it was the only reason he felt safe enough to trust it in the first place.
But I don't know that you have to hold it the same way today to honor what it gave you then.
What stands out to me is that, somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, you made a choice. You chose to go to church camp. You chose to step into a different environment. You chose to trust something enough to walk through the door.
Had you made a different choice, I don't know that we'd be having this exact conversation today.
Even if the Divine whispered, "Go there," you still had a choice. You could have said yes or no.
Maybe part of what you're wrestling with is understanding why you trusted "yes."
I believe we co-create the world around us through our choices. The relationships mattered. The faith mattered. The camp mattered.
But so did the fifteen-year-old boy who chose to walk toward them.
This is a really powerful story ... All the more powerful because you refuse to draw any of the easy lines that people usually used to divide us. I've been thinking a lot lately but one of the great gifts of Christianity is that it offers something like a physics of love and compassion ... It shows us the counterintuitive ways that opening up to the outsider or the outcaste and truly loving them can reveal something divine to us .. in us ... In them. And it seems to me that thinking about "God" in this way that is more in tune with love and emotion might be a way of sidestepping the typical theological debates, and no less "true"
I have been struck by the value of the work you’re doing and the integrity it takes to wrestle with something so hard for so many years…moving through different versions and seasons of resiliency.
I also want to challenge the feared conclusion you’ve arrived at.
You’re looking at the faith, the people, and the safety you felt at camp, and you’ve built this mechanical metaphor (better than the mechanical God you had before!) in your head: The literal theology was the fuel, the church was the engine, and the embodied love was the output. And because you feel like you've lost the 'fuel’ of literalism, you’re terrified the output is gone forever…if I’m understanding this piece, correctly?
But what if you have the physics of it backward?What if the literal theology wasn't the fuel? What if God Himself was the fuel, and the theology was just the imperfect map the camp counselors were using to try and describe Him? A map can have errors, and a map can become outdated as you grow, but the actual thing it’s pointing to doesn't cease to exist just because you set down the paper.
When those adults built that space for you, looked you in the eye, and shared a dinner table with you as a deeply dysregulated child, they weren't just completing a human program fueled by intellectual beliefs. They were sharing a real, objective, supernatural reality into your life (if you asks them, at least).
Maybe the safety you felt wasn't a placebo effect of human dogmas; it was a truer than true encounter with a Living God who met a traumatized boy exactly where he was…and continues to do that.
You are asking if that embodied reality is now forever out of your reach. But look at what you did this morning: you sat in your office, as a grown man, and you finally wept for that teenager. You gave him the permission to feel the grief he couldn't face back then. You provided the safe space for your own past self. *Where did you get the capacity to do that?*
The reality that held you at fifteen didn't vanish when your intellectual framework shifted.
The story of Jacob doesn’t end with a textbook of perfect theological answers. He walked away with a limp, a new name, and a blessing. It is okay that you can't hold the literal structures right now. God is big enough to be wrestled with. But don't let fear convince you that losing a specific way of believing means you have lost the God who built that dinner table.
I'm so glad you have decided to join the conversation and engage with my writing. I love that you wrote this as we sat together in the living room of our house across from one another. And I had to wait patiently for you to finish your thought so that we could talk more about this in person tonight.
But mostly I'm thankful for your willingness to engage in this wrestling with me, here online. I love your reframe. Maybe God was the actual fuel, not the literal theology, this whole time. That, my sweet wife, is what I am still hopeful could be true. 😘
You have no idea how much I resonate with this in this season of my life. Reading this makes me feel seen.
Inchara, I'm really glad you were able to resonate with this piece. Thank you for sharing about it, I've read your essays and I know you gone through a very serious wrestling with God as well. Glad to have you join the conversation!
This is a beautiful story, Trevor. The dinner table was a pretty powerful metaphor. I love how honest your reflections are and can really relate to what you mean about the younger version of you needing things to be literally true. It feels much safer to look to someone else to hold certainty for us when we are living in chaos than to sit with more ambiguity. I will be publishing a piece in the next few days that talks about something similar in how I outsourced authority through religion and then materialism until I could feel safe enough within myself to be able to hold the complexity of the unknown without collapsing into it.
Thanks Brianna! I really like your comment about outsourcing certainty! It's the perfect description of what was going on as a 15 year old for me and its fits my central metaphor of my writing exactly.
Looking forward to reading your upcoming piece! 😁
This is a really powerful story ... All the more powerful because you refuse to draw any of the easy lines that people usually used to divide us. I've been thinking a lot lately but one of the great gifts of Christianity is that it offers something like a physics of love and compassion ... It shows us the counterintuitive ways that opening up to the outsider or the outcaste and truly loving them can reveal something divine to us .. in us ... In them. And it seems to me that thinking about "God" in this way that is more in tune with love and emotion might be a way of sidestepping the typical theological debates, and no less "true"
I love what you wrote, "something like a physics of love and compassion", I think that is spot on! That is what I was deeply reflecting on with Mary this morning as I shared with her my revelation through tears. It is the embodied reality experienced by a hurting individual that makes the faith so profound to me still. The reflection I was doing this morning centered on the complexity of how the literal and the symbolic are intertwined, and the importance of being careful about the danger of separating them for an individual who is hurting. I don't think 15-year-old Trevor could have sat with that ambiguity . He needed to know this was literally true, mostly through the embodied presence of the people who were living it out, but also because his mind had been rendered cynical and hardened by the trauma he had experienced . And only as a grown adult can he hold the space to let go of the literal. But I'm still wrestling with the reality of why he needed that. It seems to be a "truer than true" kind of thing.
I read this after responding to someone about emotions and how, if we view them as energy, we unintentionally leave pieces of them attached to different places, people, and moments. Then one of our senses catches something and suddenly we're transported back.
But I keep lingering on the question you asked:
"Can a faith that lets go of the literal still build a space where an isolated, frightened boy finds the comfort he found?"
Being careful with how I word this, because I welcome all religions and beliefs into my space, I wonder if what pulls us isn't religion itself, but the relationship.
The trust.
The hope.
The faith.
The relationship with something greater than ourselves that we can feel, hear, and experience, even if we cannot physically touch it.
I don't know if my words fully capture what I mean, but I wonder if the space is built and the comfort is found through that relationship more than the structure that introduced us to it.
I love this perspective, and I completely agree that the heart of what healed me was the relationship, the trust, and the hope.
I agree with your assessment about the embodied power of relationships. In the world we live in, that is the one tangible thing we can psychically point to.
Also, the deeper agonizing struggle I'm in still is why did it take a literal belief system to produce the reality of the relationships that it did? And if that belief was removed, would 15-year-old me have been able to survive the chaos of his childhood ? My gut tells me no. So I feel I owe honor to that literal belief, even if I can't hold it the same way I did back then . For a hurting child, that rigid scaffolding wasn't just a container for the relationship, it was the only reason he felt safe enough to trust it in the first place.
I think this is a beautiful distinction.
But I don't know that you have to hold it the same way today to honor what it gave you then.
What stands out to me is that, somewhere in the middle of all that chaos, you made a choice. You chose to go to church camp. You chose to step into a different environment. You chose to trust something enough to walk through the door.
Had you made a different choice, I don't know that we'd be having this exact conversation today.
Even if the Divine whispered, "Go there," you still had a choice. You could have said yes or no.
Maybe part of what you're wrestling with is understanding why you trusted "yes."
I believe we co-create the world around us through our choices. The relationships mattered. The faith mattered. The camp mattered.
But so did the fifteen-year-old boy who chose to walk toward them.
This is a really powerful story ... All the more powerful because you refuse to draw any of the easy lines that people usually used to divide us. I've been thinking a lot lately but one of the great gifts of Christianity is that it offers something like a physics of love and compassion ... It shows us the counterintuitive ways that opening up to the outsider or the outcaste and truly loving them can reveal something divine to us .. in us ... In them. And it seems to me that thinking about "God" in this way that is more in tune with love and emotion might be a way of sidestepping the typical theological debates, and no less "true"