Compost for the Garden. You decide if it’s fertilizer for your faith or if it’s just sh**.

We talk about deconstruction a lot at 40 Orchards. Many people in our community use the term to describe the process of taking down the theological constructs they used to hold. It’s about leaving behind a faith or church or way of seeing the world and (hopefully) reconstructing something new.

I feel a disconnect with the term deconstruction. Not because it is wrong, but because it doesn’t feel like it captures the depth and breadth of what is happening. 

Deconstruction sounds both complete and linear. It seems like once we deconstruct what didn’t work, we can rebuild something new and be done with it. But often, leaving behind and letting go feels both more cyclical and ongoing than that. There are some parts of my theology or practices that have had to go through this process multiple times over. Not only that, I may be deconstructing one part of my faith while reconstructing another, while not even asking questions about another. All at once.

We start our Scripture Circles with a question. One of my favorite questions is,

“Where are you?”

It’s a different way of asking how someone is that allows for some creative answers. For the past few years, I’ve answered that I am in the wilderness of Beersheba, hunkered down and tending a well for people who are passing through the wilderness. There’s a lot to unpack with that statement, but that’s not for this blog. 

What I want to talk about  is how living in the wilderness has been going for this season of Advent and Christmas (amongst many other significant holidays). 

For those of us who are deconstructing, reconstructing, or trying to construct, this season can be difficult. 

Sometimes we talk about Christmas and Advent as an event that “suddenly” changed everything.

“After 400 years of silence, God suddenly spoke!”

“After the years of separation and abandonment, Immanuel suddenly came!”

“Into the darkness, suddenly there was light, peace, and hope!”

As 40 Orchards is known to do, what if we pause and reflect a bit more deeply on those sentiments?

Many of us have been wrestling with our faith over the last several years. As we have experienced people acting in unloving ways, politics becoming so divided, and the world being affected by the chaos and loss of a pandemic, it has thrown so much of what we believe up in the air.

Does God have a plan? What is the purpose of the church? Is what I was told was sinful really a sin? What does the cross actually mean?

Questions have swirled into more questions, leaving some of us feeling alone and untethered.

In those feelings of aloneness, it is easy to think we are the first or only ones to wrestle through faith shifts. Especially when the news has told us over and over again that we are in “unprecedented times.”

But what if we aren’t? Certainly, these exact circumstances haven’t existed before now. But can we find parallels with what has come before?

Dear 40 Orchards Community,

At 40 Orchards, we mark ends and beginnings at multiple times a year. As a community that focuses on concepts like life, grief, hope, and struggle, noticing seasons becomes a natural part of the conversation.

Since much of what we do runs in a school-year rhythm, it has become our practice to use August as a time to look back on the previous year of programming and happenings.

Genesis 3 is the ever-famous tale of the woman eating the forbidden fruit. So much of that narrative is another blog post (or study) for another time. In the formidable weight of this passage and its aftermath, we don’t often talk about where it begins.

Now the snake was more shrewd than all the living-things of the field that YHWH, God, had made. It said to the woman… - Genesis 3:1a (Everett Fox Translation)

Why would there be a snake in the Garden of Eden?

Have you ever thought of the Garden of Eden being a place that required tending?

It’s not an automatic paradise. It’s a place that’s co-created with the work of humans and the life-force of God. Even the blessing we were given earlier reveals that idea- to have dominion is rada, it’s the action of treading down, like stepping on the grapes to turn them into wine, or taming the wild earth into a flat tillable garden bed.

I am among those who might fit into the category of “spiritually homeless,” at least when it comes to having a church. After having been a pastor, and going through some painful losses of spiritual community, it’s been tough to find a church that feels like home. Especially when I’m not even sure what I believe church is supposed to be.

Most of the time, the 40 Orchards community feels like enough. I learn so much from those who gather. Our circles are safe spaces for me to process my own journey, even when I am the one facilitating the conversation. Not only that, but leading with Lisa means I get the gift of her voice in my life on a regular basis.

But what happens to the spiritually homeless on Easter?

Last week, we had our first Lenten Scripture Circle for Midrash & Holy Week. We talked about Luke 19:41-48, in which Jesus weeps over Jerusalem and casts the money lenders out from the Temple Mount. All of us agreed that it was not a passage we had spent much time in. Sure, we had heard of them, but that’s not the same as studying them.

It was such a rich time of communal insight that expanded how we each of us saw.