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Losing Your Faith, Finding Your Soul is for those of us who have come to the end of traditional beliefs and wonder if we have reached the end of faith as well. It is for the day when assumptions about God and the religious teachings we trusted in the past no longer apply to life. When your old beliefs die, is it possible to hold onto faith?
David Robert Anderson answers this question with a resounding yes. With Anderson as friend and guide, we discover that what once seemed an ending is actually a promising beginning—an invitation into a more authentic, and very different, spiritual experience.
- Sales Rank: #657631 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-09-17
- Released on: 2013-09-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
Q&A with David Robert Anderson
Q. When you turned 40 you experienced a series of events that shook your faith and forced you to find a new beginning in your spiritual life. Can you tell us about your experience?
A. I had a health scare that was my first brush with mortality. I thought I was a “successful” pastor until an arsonist burned down our church. People close to me started dying—then my mother died suddenly. My marriage couldn’t stand the stress. It wasn’t one thing, it was one thing after another. Life wasn’t turning out the way it was supposed to, and I was bitter, angry. I wanted my vision of the good life to be redeemed, saved. I didn’t realize it then, of course, but the collapse of my tightly controlled life was actually a prelude to a much more spacious and gracious way of living.
Q. You write that, “Only people who have faltered, lost a step, suffered and died a little, are ready for the divine life that cannot be earned but can only be received as a gift.” What is the gift that comes with coming to the end of traditional beliefs and looking for a new way forward?
A. Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son is all about grace, and yet the only person who qualifies for that grace is the one character in the story none of us wants to be! We spend the first phase of life trying to prove to ourselves, to Mom and Dad, to the world that we’re good enough—we sure don’t need anybody’s grace. Then life has a way of wearing us down or breaking us down; now we can either surrender to this greater power, or we can fight it and try to reassert our control over that old, busted life. People in twelve-step programs know this best. You have to hit bottom, they say. That’s what has to happen spiritually. You have to say Uncle. You have to be done with all the goodness you’ve earned, so that you can open your humble, empty hands and receive the gift of divine life.
Q. You take readers through the six passages that everyone must make on the way to a mature, adult soul. Can you briefly describe these passages?
A. There are six passages but only one movement, really. When we leave conventional faith—Sunday school religion, in other words—everything moves from what I call out there to in here. It begins by recognizing that from childhood, other people have told you what to believe and how to live—and you’ve complied. The System laid out the path to the good life, and you got on it. So the first passage to an adult soul is simply acknowledging that the old life has failed and you must abandon it (The Good-Bye Gate). This is where authority starts to shift from parents and pastors and teachers and mentors—to you. You don’t depend on other people to tell you what’s good or right, you Stand Apart and begin to trust yourself. Once you’ve separated yourself from everything out there, you’re able to drop down in here—into your own soul where God is waiting. I call this the Deep Dive. Now a funny thing happens, even time moves from out there to in here (Arrival Time: Now). Now all that matters is—are you alive today, right now? Are you awake in this present moment? The ultimate passage follows, and that is Unconditional Surrender. In order to live in this spacious, present moment with God, you have to give up your own control. It’s where we learn forgiveness, and trust our lives to Someone greater. The final passage, Habits of the Heart, helps you to develop the daily, habitual practices that keep you spiritually in shape and alive for the rest of your life.
Q. Is the progression through these six passages linear? How can readers make the most of each transition?
A. Each passage builds on the knowledge and experience of the previous passage, but it’s hardly a linear progression. It’s more like a looping spiral, where we keep circling back over old territory—learning and re-learning, sometimes the hard way. But when we look back after days and years, we see that, gradually, the spiral journey has in fact moved us slowly into a new place. The keys, then, are two: awareness and patience. Pay attention to where you are, and trust that God—not you!—is the one who is leading you in this movement, and it is God who longs to bring you home.
Q. The key to moving from an old, dying faith into something alive is knowing what keeps us trapped in the old faith. Why is it important for readers to know what they’re up against?
A. Anyone who sets out on a spiritual journey must be aware that the conventional life that is presented to us as the unchangeable status quo—the only game in town—is in fact a destructive way of living. You have to know that and desire something better. In Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s home town is Destruction. In other words, every person ends up living in a place where the very life is being sucked out of you. I love that scene in the book when Christian flees the city of Destruction, crying, “Life! Life!” It’s quite possible to be lulled into complacent compliance, and never realize where you’re living. If you seek the ultimate life for which human beings were created, you have to know what you’re up against. Wake up. You have to realize that your old way of living and believing has broken down, and also recognize it as a huge opportunity that can catapult you out of the old and into the new.
Q. How do you direct readers to walk through the second passage, Stand Apart? How do they find their true self?
A. Most of us realize, after thirty or forty years, that we’ve been living someone else’s life. Our ideas, beliefs, convictions are all inherited from the group—family, ethnic heritage, church, neighborhood, school. There’s nothing wrong with that, in fact in the early stages of life it’s a gift. But eventually it becomes groupthink, and the “ties that bind” must be loosened—sometimes broken. In order to find our true self, we have to step away from all the groups that have defined us since birth. Murray Bowen called this “self-differentiation.” I devote a whole chapter (Leaving Home) to the important work of separating from our family of origin, which turns out not to be a rejection of home but the healthiest way to be an adult child. Further, I help the reader to separate from conventional notions of “being good” and from the whole construct of Heaven & Hell, which in its popular form keeps us trapped in the reward-and-punishment system of early-stage religion.
About the Author
David Robert Anderson is an Episcopal priest living in Darien, Connecticut. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Divinity School, he is a frequent blogger and the author of Breakfast Epiphanies. David is married to Pam Anderson, a cookbook author and food blogger. They have two adult daughters.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Ariadne’s Thread
After a time, Christian reached the Wicket Gate, and over it was written, “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”—John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
In the winter of my fortieth year I was sitting in a doctor’s office, squirming to get back to work. I was a very busy pastor, only there to get some meds for my strep throat and get back in the game.
A wise, old nurse popped a thermometer in my mouth. “Let me get your blood pressure,” she muttered. I took off my coat and rolled up my left sleeve. The cuff wheezed and crimped my bicep as I stared at the white wall. “What’s your usual blood pressure?” the nurse asked me. I didn’t know. I’d had my blood pressure taken for years; no one had ever given me a reading. “Well, it’s high,” she said. “150 over 102.” The numbers might as well have been a blowout NBA game. They meant nothing to me, but I could tell immediately that something was wrong.
“I want you to see the doctor, Reverend.”
My doctor was kind and upbeat, but after taking my pressure for himself, he had to deliver the news. This was nothing to flirt with. Hypertension was like plugging a 110-watt body into a 220 socket. “Leading cause of stroke.” He used words like “heart failure,” “aneurysm,” and “renal failure.” And my numbers were way over the top.
I went home with a prescription for Prinivil. The little blue pill brought my blood pressure down from the danger zone, but it was not the medicine for what really ailed me. What I most needed was to relax, stop working sixteen-hour days, pull back a bit on the throttle. But no doctor could script that, only I could. And I was not ready.
Things were going too well. The small church I had begun to lead four years before was now a rapidly growing congregation. Attendance was up. Giving was up. It was growing faster than I could manage, and we had called the first assistant clergy in the church’s 120-year history.
Every Sunday the ushers were setting up folding chairs in the aisles, and we knew we had to do something. We were planning a capital campaign to build a new church more than double the size, enlarge the parish hall, add Sunday school classrooms, and build a parking lot. A minister’s dreams are made of this stuff. I was a “success.” Over the next two years we completed the building plans and raised close to two million dollars. That spring we were lining up building permits and preparing to break ground in the fall. But it all went up in smoke.
At 10:00 p.m. on a Mother’s Day night the phone beside my bed rang. There was a fire at the church. I jumped into my jeans and then into the car. When I crested the hill on Route 263, still a mile from the church, the sky was all orange. I groaned as if someone had punched me in the belly.
That night, along with scores of parishioners who had heard the news, I stood on the porch of the house next door and watched it all burn down. The school, the parish hall with its leaded windows and wood-beamed ceilings, and finally the church, built of Pennsylvania fieldstone in 1876. It was all gone now—my life’s work. But it got worse. Two days later, federal ATF officials informed me that the fire had been deliberately set. This wasn’t just a terrible tragedy; it was a horrible, senseless crime. I fancied myself the victor, but I did not know how to be the victim. I was forty-two years old, approaching the pinnacle of my career, and someone with a gas can and a match had destroyed everything.
This was not what I deserved, not what I was promised. I was emotionally exhausted and spiritually pissed. In public, of course, I was strong and dependable. I preached about forgiving the arsonist. I told people God would only use this to make us better, stronger, more compassionate. But in my lonely moments I was foul, angry. The whole thing was a stupid outrage. A few months later my mother died, and that loss pushed me over the edge. I slid into depression.
The fire that night had been more than a church fire—it was a funeral pyre. What had gone up in tall columns of smoke were my sense of who I was, the sure promise of life, my reliable faith, my comforting hope—all of it gone. Well, most of it. At the peak of my life, when I expected to be strongest in faith, I was weakest. I was losing it. I thought I was finished.
I didn’t know it then, but what I thought was an end was in fact a beginning, and a promising one. Gradually, I realized that what was happening to me was universal. One way or another everyone comes to this pyre, loses the familiar old, and gropes for a way forward. That strange and remarkable passage is what I want to share in the pages ahead.
This is a book for people whose faith has failed them. It’s for people who used to believe. People who still pretend to believe, who are still teaching their kids to believe, still going to church. Or not. It is for people who have felt spiritually numb for years, their faith snuffed out with the candle of innocence.
This is a book for people who’ve walked to the front of a church to surrender their lives to God, maybe more than once. People whose prayers used to be answered (at least most of the time). People who have known Jesus in their hearts for years but wonder now whether he was only a figment of their childhood imagination. Their fixed theological views don’t seem so fixed anymore.
I write this for men and women who’ve lived long enough to hit a few brick walls. For some, I’ve discovered, that collision comes early. Maybe for you it was at university, or the early years of building a career or raising a family. Maybe a person or an event outside your control tipped you into the suffering years too soon—stole away your comfortable certitudes and left you to contemplate cold, hard reality long before your peers.
Or maybe this is you: You’ve got a job but haven’t made it to the top yet, and it’s pretty clear you’re never going to. You have a house; it used to be your “dream house,” but now the dream looks scuffed and slightly dated. You have a husband or a wife and children, but they all pretty much go their separate ways in the morning. Everyone’s stressed. Your marriage is on autopilot, and you’re too tired to have sex. You’ve worked hard, been responsible, saved for college. You took the kids to church until they started playing hockey and soccer on Sunday mornings. You believe in something eternal, but it seems a million miles from where you live. Any faith you had seems powerless before the problems you face and the questions that haunt you in the night. You’ve hit some crisis that calls into question the whole way you’ve been living your life. You need to slay a big dragon, and you know you’re going to need something more than your old go-to faith.
The paradox that crisscrosses adult faith is that all the liabilities of aging now become your chief assets. Only people who have faltered, lost a step, suffered and died a little are ready for the divine life that cannot be earned or grasped but can only be received as a gift. Right now, all you need to be in line for that gift is a willingness, like Noah, to sail away from the old world—recognize you can’t hold on to what’s passing away—and trust that God is leading you to a place you cannot yet envision. That’s why this first passage is the Good-Bye Gate.
But this is not a book to take away your faith. It is a tract that meets you down at the soul’s Lost Luggage counter, to show you how a renewed and deeper faith grows precisely through loss and disillusionment.
For twenty years as a pastor I’ve had a privileged role as a spiritual guide for men and women trying their best to live lives of faith, lives of depth and meaning. I’ve been there from birth to death and everything in between. There are always seasons of joy and triumph—Ilove those times, of course, but it’s no secret that these are not the spiritual hot spots. I’ve learned the hard way that moments of confusion and grief are.
When people are slogging through the Slough of Despond or enduring the Dark Night of the Soul, I’ve been invited to sit with them, listen, offer advice and support. Maybe they sought me out because they sensed that my being a pastor had not shielded me from the changes and chances of life.
I’ve found myself sitting with women who wanted another baby because they felt their lives had no purpose once their kids were all in school. With men at the peak of their powers who had been cashiered at work, who bounced like a pinball between rage, indignation, and depression. With couples facing a child’s autism or a teenager’s drug charges.
Their words echoed my own: “This is not what I expected.” “This isn’t right.” “How could this happen to me?”
Like most pastors or therapists, I look back now and wonder what I could possibly have said to these poor people when I was lost in the same maze with no idea, really, how to find the way home.
It’s been a few years. I’m in my midfifties now, and while I don’t claim to have arrived, I have learned a few things about this trek. Because I now speak and write about faith lost and found, more people ask me for guidance when they feel lost. If there’s even a little receptivity, I invite people to lean into the pain. What are the spiritual dimensions of this crisis? When you’re done fidgeting with the levers of the time machine and it’s clear there’s no going back, what are you going to do? What if failure, disruption, and endless changes are part of the divine plan? What if the life you’re trying desperately to turn around is in fact dragging you assward through the knothole of glory? What if the mess you’re trying to clean up is actually God’s masterpiece of nonrepresentational art, bricolaged from all the adventures and ordeals of your life? (And yes, that red is blood.)
Over the years I’ve worked with many people who have lost their old faith—sometimes in heartbreaking ways—and finally found their souls. Almost all of them got pushed into this backhanded blessing. They didn’t get there by being especially good or virtuous. They fell. They got fired. They got sick, or someone they love got sick. They drank themselves into some abyss. They lost a lot of money. The sheriff served them with papers.
For others the fall is more like a long slide. The career plateaus, the children fail to turn out well, collagen dissolves, a herniated disk cripples the signature golf swing. The golden boy fades to brass, and the prom queen falls from grace. It’s a gradual descent, but the effect is the same. They’re lost. Everything they believed in, the landmarks they steered by, are gone. After that they have to find a new way to live, but how do they do that? Nearly everyone is clueless. Actually, it’s worse than that.
Let me explain.
For most people, the eclipse of an old life presents only one challenge: how to get it back. If you come to me or to a therapist, you’re looking for help in fixing what’s broken, solving the problem, and getting life back to normal. That’s a legitimate response in our youth. But those of us who’ve passed the meridian of life need a push.
Can you locate your soul at the bottom of this morass? If the old version of you doesn’t work anymore, who are you really? If success has failed you, what actually brings happiness and fulfillment? If what you thought was ultimate turns out to be transient, what’s truly eternal? If the poles of your world have been reversed, and the way up is the way down, where do you even start?
Instinctively, many people turn to their faith. And what they dredge up is a huge disappointment. It’s usually some relic of adolescence or the ascendant years of early adulthood. Some people gave up on religion and faith soon after those early years. Others have beenmore or less faithful and still end up completely bollixed.
Early-stage faith is always about polishing the apple for God’s desk. It’s all about achievement—religious or spiritual performance (being good, helping others, qualifying for heaven), but achievement all the same—which is why it fits perfectly with the first half of life but becomes a serious liability in the second. When you need something to access the realm of mystery and inner power, you reach for your faith and come up with a memory box filled with old beliefs, bromides, rules, and rituals. There’s nothing exactly wrong with any of it, except that now it seems antique, sentimental, useless.
Plenty of people have sat in my office, or in the coffee shop where I meet most seekers, and opened that old box. Some feel helpless, others embarrassed. This is when I have to deliver the news: as painful as it is to file for spiritual bankruptcy, it’s just the ticket. Adult faith begins with a great big ugly death. You move through this first passage, the Good-Bye Gate. Have a good cry and let’s move on.
“Wait just a blessed minute!” comes the retort. “Where do I go from here? How do I go from here? If spirituality isn’t about being good or doing the right things, if it can’t protect me from pain and loss, improve my life, and help me solve my problems, what’s the point?”
A suspicious look often follows. “Since I was a kid, people like you—pastors, priests, people in collars and robes—have been telling me that religion is all about being a better person, accepting Jesus, believing the Bible. If I believed in God and tried to be the sort of person God wanted me to be, I’d be happy in this life and find heaven
in the next.” They don’t usually finish the thought, but the look says:
“So where do you come off telling me it’s all bunkum?”
How do you tell people that everything they’ve ever believed is important, necessary and—now—behind them? I have often wished I could reach for a guidebook, a map of the soul, to give to people sitting there so lost.
Two summers ago my wife, Pam, and I went hiking in Vermont. We bought a book that detailed scores of beautiful trails in the area and then laced up our boots. We started with the easiest paths, but after the first week we were physically ready for steeper, more rugged climbs. What was not quite so ready was our sense of orientation. The
more challenging trails were hardly worn, far less traveled, often obscured by undergrowth. Unlike on the comfy paths, we found no friendly printed signs with arrows. All we had were the trail map and infrequent blazes. Many blazes were weathered and disappeared into the mottle of tree bark. You could get lost, and we did.
Once we wandered so far off the trail that we ended up in the backyard of a small cottage on the edge of the woods. A helpful woman showed us how to get back to the trail. We learned on those advanced hikes how to internalize the directions and landmarks from the trail map. We developed an eye for blazes and a sense of the intervals between them—when to expect the next one.
That’s what I want to give people who are lost midfaith—a simple map with directions for exactly this section of the trail, detailing major landmarks and tricky turns you’re certain to miss without help. No one gave me that map. I was a minister, and yet I wasn’t prepared when my steadfast faith buckled beneath me. Half the stuff I had been peddling from the pulpit was true in theory, but I didn’t really know what it meant.
When Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” I pretended to get it, but I didn’t—not really. Other, less circumspect people lost things, not me. Especially not my life. But after the turbulent years of my early forties, I sensed that my life had somehow gone lost (even if I hadn’t set out to lose it), and I had to know the secret of those cryptic words.
I picked up a few books on the stages of faith development and was heartened to discover that my predicament was universal. As psychologist James Hillman says, “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.” I wasn’t alone. What was happening to me was part of a predictable pattern of human development. Knowing that universal pattern is like having a map of your life—with an Xthat says, “You are here.”
Of all the books I read on the topic, the one that changed my outlook was James Fowler’s classic Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. I was fascinated by the progression of every stage, from infancy to childhood, from adolescence to the many incarnations of adulthood. But what “spoke to my condition,” as the Quakers say, was the midlife breakdown that happened like clockwork. In the lifelong progression of faith, this was the big megillah—and I was in it. What I was experiencing was a systemic collapse. If what I was reading was true, however, it wasn’t my fault. In good time, it happens to everybody. Every human being is equipped from birth with an operating system. It’s the basic system that tells you who you are, how to behave, what is good and true and beautiful, how to be a success, how to be happy. No one ever says, “Pardon me while I transfer a few files into
your operating system.” You’re not even aware the system exists. It runs in the background and makes everything else possible, but no one mentions it, just as no one says, “Now I am breathing,” or “Now my cerebral cortex is engaging.” This operating system serves most of us very well in our early, formative years.
The problem is, this software has a fatal virus. It is programmed to guide us to our peak powers and then to crash. At some point in our lives, what has always worked doesn’t anymore. It is as if a curtain is pulled back, and what was always just whirring quietly in the background is now revealed. It is a system. And it’s broken. We call it Convention. The beautiful irony is, it cannot be named or even seen until it crashes.
That’s where I was at forty. Maybe that’s where you are now at twenty-eight or forty or sixty-two. Improbably, this turns out to be the golden moment.
According to Fowler and the many other prophets of human development, recognizing the pervasive power of that conventional system is key to spiritual growth. We have to recognize it, escape it, transcend it. That is the task of maturity. There are stages before and stages after, but this is the big one.
In earlier years, the transitions flow almost naturally. But getting beyond Convention is like escaping the hideous tractor beam in Star Trek. For that we need help.
As I came to understand this, whenever I looked at the adults in my congregation—not to mention my friends, my colleagues, the characters in nearly every book and movie—I found myself concluding, “They’re all stuck in Convention.” I saw a lot of pain and confusion, a lot of resentment and bitterness. Some tried to keep up religious
appearances with a disciplined program of denial; others went cool and cynical. Some were still clinging to the beautiful memories of past faith, which can sometimes be relived but with weaker and weaker claims to reality. If I could help people recognize what was happening— translate the psychological and theological into the terms of everyday life—I might be able to help people escape the conventional trap and find the path to redemption and happiness.
Here I offer six passages that lead the way out of the old, dying form of your faith and into what is new, mysterious, and alive. Beginning with the Good-Bye Gate—the moment when conventional faith breaks down—these passages are designed to lead you through what is often a confusing labyrinth. This ancient myth may help to illumine the path.
When Theseus volunteers to kill the Minotaur, and so spare the poor Athenian children who will otherwise be fed to this awful beast, he has two problems: killing the half-bull half-man (no small task), and finding his way back. The Minotaur crouches at the center of a vast maze on the isle of Crete. Even if Theseus can find his way to the center of the maze and manage to slay the beast, he will not be able to find his way out. It is Ariadne who comes to Theseus’s aid. She gives him a ball of thread, which he ties to the entrance door and unwinds as he twists his way to the center. After dispatching the Minotaur, he follows the thread and winds his way out of the labyrinth.
That is what I have set out to do here. The six passages of this book require something like Ariadne’s thread. These are the natural pathways of the soul, six passages every man and woman must make on the way to a mature, adult soul. Yet they lead through confusing and difficult terrain, where the road home is counterintuitive: the right way is often the one that appears wrong. You need a lead to follow.
Like the Cretan labyrinth, these six passages are not a linear progression. Different people will make these moves in different orders; nevertheless, each passage is threaded to another. Finding your way through one opening gives you the wisdom to choose well at the next intersection. What you learn in one passage will help you take other important steps along the way.
Negotiating each passage requires a level of honesty, courage, and trust available only to those who have come to the end of themselves—and then found a small opening, a light, and a way forward.
That is why this whole endeavor is cloaked in paradox: our losses turn out to be necessary—and as such, gifts. It’s not easy to acknowledge defeat, the end of our best-laid plans, but we are never given a new life until we have released the old one. That pattern of losing-to-find, emptying-to-be-filled, dying-to-be-reborn is the promise that sings through every passage, along every mile of this pilgrimage.
I hope you’ll think of me as your Ariadne, offering you a skein of thread, a slender guiding strand, a filament of hope that enables you to turn a corner and keep going when everything in your head is crying, “Go back!”
This ball I hold is woven of many strands. Years of my own experience and that of the men and women I’ve counseled, together with threads of Merton and Jung, Oliver and Eliot and Dillard. Stories of faith, hope, and love that others have told me along the way, tales of losses that became precious, endings that birthed beginnings. I’ve collected them like bits of string, woven them together and wound them one by one over the years. They are what inspire and delight me, the only things that keep me going.
Here, take this thread. You’ll need it for the passage that awaits.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
running the beach blind
By Michael
If I had to summarize this book, I would simply direct the reader to two pages, where the author tells the story of running on the beach(chapter 16, pages 182-183). He is off for a morning run and the sand is hard, the wind is brisk and the people in the distance are the size of match sticks. And then the idea comes to him: close your eyes--and keep running. I'll let the author finish the tale but that story sums up the book for me.
Much of the failure in modern spiritual literature derives from its need to keep catechizing even though, for many readers, the old catechism is dead and our allegiance to anything dogmatic is also dead.
Anderson's genius is that he doesn't get caught up in this. He is a practicing Christian and a Christian minister, but he doesn't push the Christian faith. He doesn't preach. What he's doing is inviting us to go on a journey with him, going deeper into his own faith to find, along with those of other faiths, a more fundamental spiritual unity.
Call it the True Self, the Higher Self, or the Self-in-God--the attempt to define it too explicitly is part of the riddle Anderson is asking us to stop solving. On this journey, we are best led by a guide "who only has at heart your getting lost" to use a line from Robert Frost. David Anderson is that guide.
We are closer to salvation when we close our eyes, release the need for certainty and just run with the wind.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Trade Beauty for Ashes
By Angela Barthauer
Anderson's book gives great peace to those whose religious journey has not been the perfect picture they had imagined. Finding grace, joy and beauty from the ashes is a gift that only God can give. The only thing WE can do is to allow Him to work. Sometimes that is the hardest part. Anderson brings wonderful insight and deep wisdom from his own journey toward a mature, all-encompassing faith.
I would briefly caution most evangelical Christians that you will find Anderson's theology more liberal than to what you may be accustomed. Please do not let that stop you from reading a beautiful rendering of the spiritual life that God alone calls to each of us.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
The Gift of the Midlife Crisis
By Paula Greene
The midlife breakdown happens like clockwork. A systemic collapse. I never thought it would really happen to me. My faith in Christ was rock solid, could never be shaken. I knew the Bible inside and out, and felt like I knew God the same way. I had been face-to-face with grief, suffering, and evil I had been disappointed, treated unjustly, and peed on by people whose acceptance and affirmation I craved. I thought I understood why God allows suffering and evil and how he transforms us into a Christ-like image of Him.
And then one day, five months ago, the impossible happened. My belief left me. I had believed in some invisible world and a God who watched over me – and I went along with all this nonsense that turned out to be a hoax. The things I learned (and taught) in Sunday school were stupid. My whole life had been built on lies. It was like looking in the mirror and seeing a silly costume on me and asking, “who picked this out for me?”(Anderson helped me articulate this feeling in his book).
The fourth month into my spiritual/identity crisis, I picked up this book and opened up a whole new world. Anderson helped me to begin to make sense of all this. His own journey resonated with me. He explained the stages of faith, how the midlife crisis is a gift in that it dethrones the pretender self and welcomes the ascent of the real self. As we start to separate from the worn-out system, we discover we can take charge of our own lives, let go of the “you should’s”. We step out, stand apart, and plant our flag, uncovering what is inside and not creating something externally anymore.
Anderson explains that as we do the early work of separation, firming up the core of our being, we find we are no longer dependent on other people to change so that we can be free. We no longer depend on other people to be less depressing or judgmental so that we can be happy. We no longer depend on them to act like mature adults so we can too.
If your faith has failed you at some point in life, if you used to believe, or if you are pretending to believe and going through the motions, if you feel like your faith has been snuffed out by evil or suffering after a life surrendered to God, then I would recommend David Anderson’s book. He will not lead you to evangelical or even Christian conclusions. The journey is yours. Like me, you may not agree with everything he says. But he will help you articulate the journey, make sense of it, and lead you through the stages of doubt and re-discovery, pointing you toward where you are headed. He will help you change your crisis into a journey. (Thank you Blogging for Books and Convergent Publishing for providing me a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.)
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