A while back, someone left a comment on one of my YouTube videos saying that he didn't think deconstruction was complete unless we also deconstructed all notions of God. While I certainly have also deconstructed many of my past distorted notions and images of God, there is a reason my deconstruction did not lead me to stop believing in God or Jesus Christ, and that's the part of my story I wish to tell in this sharing.
The very first time I experienced God speaking to me was in my parents' bedroom. My younger brother and I had to camp out on the floor of their bedroom for a couple of weeks because our bedrooms were being renovated.
I was tossing and turning after the rest of my family had fallen asleep, and for some reason I decided to mentally flip through different popular devotional images of Jesus, such as Jesus as the Good Shepherd, Jesus knocking on the door with no handle, Jesus of the Sacred Heart etc. With my eyes closed, I said silently to Jesus, "Lord, do you know how much I need you?"
I had not expected any reply. My eyes flew open in shock when I "heard" a thought immediately afterwards saying, "The question is, Ann, do YOU know how much you need me?" Before I even had the chance to question whether I was imaginging this exchange or not, my mind was suddenly presented with flashbacks from the past few days. It felt like I was watching a replay of moments in my life that week that I had not flagged as particularly important.
I saw myself walking out of school alone after another long and tiring day. As I neared the gates of the school I caught up with one of my teachers who usually flagged a cab for her ride home just outside the school gates. To my surprise, she kept walking on with me till I reached my bus stop (which was another 10-15 min walk) before she flagged her cab.
Right after that, I saw another moment in the week when I was walking to the minimart within my condominium estate. Our Indonesian Muslim domestic helper was walking beside me. I had been quiet and downcast that day and we were walking in silence when out of the blue, she quietly reached out and held my hand as we continued to walk.
Right after those memories flashed before me, I heard these words in my heart, "Ann, did you know that was ME in those moments, loving you?" Tears poured down my face as I tried to keep my crying quiet so as not to wake my family. What had taken place was so fast, so unexpected and so visceral that I had no doubt it was indeed the Lord who had spoken to me. And his message to this lonely sixteen year old was that HE was loving and accompanying me through the people in my life even when I did not recognise him.
I hardly slept that night. It was my very first experience of a spiritual high. And I remember going to school the next day still feeling the afterglow of the encounter, even though I had nobody to share it with who would understand.
That everyday mystical experience marked the start of more frequent conversations with God. I didn't always hear a reply. And I wasn't always sure that it was God and not my own imagined responses when I did get a thought in reply. But I would talk to God anyway and those impromptu conversational prayers in my teens culminated in another memorable, life-defining encounter when I was eighteen.
This time I was sitting on the floor of my own bedroom late at night because I was wrestling with choosing a university and a course of study to apply to. What I wanted was to apply to Catholic universities in the United States and study theology and philosophy. In case you didn't know, this was not a path that pragmatic Chinese Singaporean elders would be happy about because it wouldn't prepare me for any good job that was available here in Singapore!
Back in the 1990s, there was no career option for full-time lay ecclesial ministers. Furthermore, I was in a scholarship program in my junior college that prepared students to win government scholarships for studies at Oxbridge in the UK or Ivy League universities in the United States. Everybody wanted me to go this route, but the Singapore government was certainly not handing out scholarships to study theology!
So that particular night I was telling God about my dilemma. I wanted to study theology and philosophy because I wanted to learn more about him and about my faith and it was the first time I felt like I had found subjects I would be passionate about studying. But I was experiencing pressure to choose a different path - to choose a course of study that could give me a steady job like the rest of my peers were doing.
"It's not that I don't want to do your will, Lord, but how I can do it if I don't know your will?" And, I remember this so clearly, being the smart-ass teenager I was, I even told God, "You don't even have to be so specific as to tell me which university or program to apply to... just tell me my mission and I'm smart enough to figure out which path to take!"
So I sat there for a few minutes bombarding God with, "Why won't you tell me my mission?" until a sudden thought interrupted me. "Ann, are you willing to suffer for me?" That thought stunned me, but I was doubtful. Was that my imagination? Or was that God? But if I was making this conversation up, why on earth would I be asking if I was willing to suffer? How was that even a response to "tell me my mission"? It was not something that I - at that stage - was capable of coming up with.
Tentatively, I decided to assume it was God speaking to me. "Ok Jesus, I know you taught that we have to pick up our cross and follow you, but why does suffering have to be part of it at all? Why does it have to be so hard?"
Right after I said that, my eyes fell on a piece of written paper I had pinned to a cork board above my desk. It was a quote I had copied down some time ago and it was Jesus telling St. Teresa of Avila, "It is on those whom I love most that I lay the heaviest crosses." I realised God was replying my question not by explaining why the cross was necessary in discipleship but by telling me that this is what he shares with those he loves.
Reading that made me really sad though because I was terrified of suffering. I knew I wasn't ready to answer "yes". Did it mean then, that God was not going to give me a mission because I wasn't ready to suffer for him? How would I ever become ready to be on mission for Christ when I was so afraid?
Right after I had those thoughts, my eyes fell on another piece of paper on the board. This time, it was a scripture verse that my younger brother had copied out for me when he was still in primary (grade) school. I had pinned it there and forgotten about it, but at that moment, all of a sudden, I read the words from John 4:13-15:
Jesus said to her, "Every one who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."
As I read those words, I heard Jesus say to me, "Silly girl, of course I know that you are afraid of suffering and that you don't have the strength to carry your cross. It is I, living in you, who will carry it."
It was at that moment that it hit me: God - the Creator of the universe had deigned to answer my questions - me, a little nobody school girl in Singapore sitting on her bedroom floor. I was stunned, awed and overwhelmed by a sense of being seen, heard and LOVED - without any merit - by the Lord. That particular conversation with God continued still at some length and I grabbed the nearest piece of paper I could find and wrote down everything I was "hearing" because I didn't want to ever forget them.
That night, I had the thought - after this, could I ever doubt that God was real? And if now I knew for sure that God was not only real, but that he saw me, heard me, and is loving me, how could I not want to live my life for him? There came from my heart a genuine response to the love I had experienced from God. I wanted to return his love. I wanted to live for him!
However, mixed in with that genuine response was also a sense of obligation and duty to not let God down. That sense of duty and even fear of disappointing God came from my complex trauma, and it was not something I would even become aware of for many years yet.
Complex trauma made it impossible for me at the time to receive God's unconditional love unconditionally. Experiencing his love made me feel like I had to work even harder now to deserve his love. The more graces I received and the more I felt God's presence in my life, the more afraid I became that I would do something to lose his love.
Because I had never experienced a securely attached relationship in my young life, I did not know how to have a secure relationship with God. I truly longed to be pleasing to God, but it came from a place of fear that I would be abandoned if I could not please him. All of these deeper truths of my heart would remain hidden to me until my late-thirties when the time came for God to expose these "rotten foundations" of my relationship with him and call them forth for deconstruction and rebuilding.
For the next two decades after these life-changing encounters with God, my quest to draw closer to Christ through growing in knowledge and understanding of my Catholic faith continued to be built on the shaky human foundation I had due to my complex familial and relational trauma. Trauma shaped not only how I understood my faith experiences, it also shaped how I believed and practised my Catholicism because I had unmet needs that I unknowingly looked to my Catholic faith to fulfil.
Because I had no solidity and stability within my own Self, I was looking for rock-solid certainty from outside of me. I needed clear black and white rules about how I could be pleasing to God and remain in his grace. And because I had no sense of belonging, I was eager to experience pride (and even triumphalism) in belonging to the "One True Church".
To be continued in Part 6.
An Important Note
As I emphasise repeatedly in my podcast and YouTube episodes around deconstruction, there is no "better" or "right" way to deconstruct. Each deconstruction journey is unique to the individual's story and experience of faith. I believe that the reason I did not stop believing in Christ was because in my own story I have had such deep and indelible encounters of all three persons of the Holy Trinity that even as I deconstructed many of the old constructs and images I had of God, I simply could not ultimately deny the transcendent Love that knows me so intimately and calls me by name.
While my relationship with God remained and deepened through deconstruction, how I see and understand that relationship as well as how I show up in it is now so different that I no longer fit in or feel at home in "regular Catholic spaces".
There are others who have written to me who have shared similar experiences as I have, but there are also many others whose experiences of God have been so entwined with spiritual abuse and trauma that they needed to deconstruct everything to the point of becoming an atheist or agnostic. I want to stress that this is completely understandable and legitimate. Each person's story has a unique unfolding and can never be compared with another person's journey.
If you wish to hear more about how and why there is no "right way" to deconstruct, you can listen to or watch my episode: Deconstruction: A Trauma-Informed, Integrative and First-Hand Perspective.
Journeying with you,
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