"Seeking God" vs "Believing in God"

Last month, Pope Leo XVI responded to someone who thinks of himself an atheist, but who "feels the need to love God". Pope Leo wrote:

"the real problem with faith is not believing or not believing in God, but seeking Him!" “[God] allows himself to be found by the heart that seeks him... and perhaps the right distinction to make is not so much between believers and non-believers, but between seekers and non-seekers of God.”

The pope goes on to write:

“one can believe that one believes and not seek the face of God, not love him; one can believe that one does not believe and be ardent seekers of his face, loving him as you do. So, Rocco, we are all longing for Love, we are all seekers of God. And therein lies the dignity and beauty of our lives.”

Is this not heartening for those of us who find ourselves in the midst of deconstructing and feeling lost about where we stand with regards to God when we used to be so clear and certain that we were "believers"? If we are deconstructing because we are seeking Truth and Love, then we are actually seeking the face of God. We may find it hard to believe but we could actually be deconstructing our faith because we love God and are not satisfied with how our "belief in God" (to date) reflects who God is!

In my most recent Becoming Me podcast episode I shared about a listener who emailed me and asked me a similar question. She had been deconstructing her Christian faith and finds herself at the current moment, an "agnostic". She wondered if there had been people who had completely deconstructed their faith in the Christian God, stopped "believing" so to speak, and later reconstructed their faith in Jesus Christ. (You can listen to or watch that episode to find out my response to her question!)

According to Pope Leo, "we are all longing for Love, we are all seekers of God. And therein lies the dignity and beauty of our lives". I believe we honour and please God very much when our desire for integrity, truth, justice, compassion and love leads us to deconstruct our beliefs because we find that we are no longer convinced that our Christian / Catholic faith - as we have known and practiced it - truly reflects the God we continue to seek.

We honour God when we find that we cannot shake this inner conviction that "true religion" - if there is such a thing - will not traumatise us or control us in the name of God but set us free to love God and to love like God.

Recent Podcast Episodes

EP 164 | How Moral Injury Can Lead to Deconstruction

In this episode, I talk about how moral injury can be connected to or trigger deconstruction. This is a topic that has been deeply significant in my own journey of interior integration and healing.

Moral injury is the damage done to one's conscience or moral compass when we perpetrate, witness, or fail to prevent acts that transgress our own moral beliefs and values. Originally studied in war veterans, this concept has helped me understand the trauma I've experienced in relation to the Catholic Church and spiritual harm.

I share how moral injury doesn't just happen when we're directly involved in something wrong—it can occur when we're spectators to injustice, when institutions we trust betray their stated values, or when spiritual leaders remain silent in the face of harm. I also explore how we often defend ourselves against moral injury through rationalisation, and how the journey of interior integration requires us to become more embodied and truthful about reality.

This episode is deeply personal as I reflect on my own experiences of deconstruction—not as a total loss of faith, but as a necessary dismantling of religious frameworks that could no longer hold the truth I was encountering in my relationship with God.

EP 165 | Deconstructing 'God' vs 'Christianity / Catholicism'

Have you ever wondered why some people deconstruct not only their religion but also their entire faith in God, while others deconstruct aspects of organised religion yet retain a relationship with the divine or even with the Christian God?

In this episode, I explore the distinction between deconstructing our notions of God and deconstructing the institutional aspects of faith like Christianity or Catholicism. Drawing from personal experience, I discuss how our individual deconstruction journeys unfold differently based on the depth of our personal encounters with God versus what we've been taught through religious tradition.

In this episode I discuss
• The difference between deconstructing religion vs. deconstructing God
• How personal mystical experiences shape our faith journey
• How conflicting imprints about God in our nervous systems can create an insecure, “disorganised” or confused attachment with God
• Understanding "spiritual but not religious" in the context of deconstruction
• The apophatic (mystical) tradition in Christianity

Journeying with you as always,