For many years, the month of May has symbolized mothers, motherhood, birth, and death, at least for me personally. Not only is Mother’s Day in the month of May, but I gave birth to my first living baby in May 2018 and my mother passed away May 5th 2011. Last year I pierced my ears a couple more times so that I would have five piercings in each ear symbolizing the date 5/5.
My mother’s death had a pretty significant impact on my deconstruction journey. My perspective thirteen years later is that mum (Aussie spelling) began to deconstruct some of her beliefs in the last couple of years before she died. She listened to a lot of Joseph Prince sermons (a preacher in Singapore), and threw off the chains of legalism and perfectionism, embracing the gospel of unconditional love and grace. It wasn’t that she didn’t already believe in God’s grace, but it was less experientially true to her as she served the church, trying to please her family (her father was a Church of God pastor), and fit in with her friends. Before she died, she began to care a lot less what people thought of her because she understood that God loved and accepted her no matter what she said or did (that kind of grace).
Mum extended this “radical” level of love, grace and acceptance to her brother who came out as gay. She made amends with some of her children for various things she had said and done over the years that were harsh or judgmental. I believe she released a lot of her own self-hatred. She was transformed and I got to witness it probably more intimately than anyone else, since I was one of her carers.
The interesting thing for me was that I had already embraced a deeper grace message ten years prior while I was at Bible college. When I moved back home after living interstate for college, I was preaching a radical grace message about how everyone was forgiven for everything so there was no reason to hate on each other or judge each other so harshly. My message was met with… temperance. A kind of “yes, but,” attitude. After dozens of conversations with family members and friends, I was put in my place. I understood that I had been transformed on the inside by the grace message, but that did not mean everyone else needed to believe the same things. I no longer suffered the level of depression, anxiety and particularly shame that I had suffered as a child, because I had come to believe—like my mum did later on—that no matter what I did, God would always love and accept me. I no longer perceived my guilt and shame as coming from God. Shame no longer served me the same way, and I was able to decrease the amount of both guilt and shame that I experienced. Maybe other Christians just didn’t suffer the same level of self-hatred, so they didn’t need a radical grace-shift. Of course, one can never be rid of all guilt, but I was able to be a little more relaxed about life, about making so-called “mistakes,” or “sinning,” and to love myself a lot more in my twenties than I had as a child.
When my mother embraced a very similar grace message at the age of 47-ish, (and I was 27-ish), this became the impetus for my deconstructing hell a couple of years later. I had started to question the likelihood of hell being real way back in Bible college too. But since I had experienced overwhelming hesitancy from family and friends, I put the idea on the shelf. Maybe hell does exist, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, I was not going there, and I sufficiently doubted that most people on planet earth were going there. Whereas, the impression I got from other Christians was that most people go to hell and only those who “believe in Jesus” go to heaven, I believed that most people probably had a relationship with God deep down inside, that we could not see or judge, and that only very few “god-haters” might go to hell.
Even in my early twenties I suspected that if anyone went to hell, they likely were not stuck there and God would likely still be able to save them. I was a very secret—closeted—“hopeful universalist,” attending a Pentecostal church, in which almost no one knew this about me and assumed I was still praying for people to “get saved” during the alter calls every single Sunday. When I prayed for their salvation, it was only because I wanted them to live happier and healthier lives, not to “save” them from “hell.” For me, salvation had become much more about releasing shame and guilt, and embracing love and grace/forgiveness in this life, than to do with heaven and hell of the afterlife.
By the age of thirty, I traded in my hopeful-universalism for hardcore universalism. Dogmatic, even. And I attribute this change, at least indirectly to my mother’s cancer journey and subsequent passing. I can’t help but suspect she was headed in the same direction. She had changed churches and was studying the grace-based gospel under Pastor Santo Calarco. I moved to his church at the beginning of 2011, a few months before mum died. I read Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” in 2012, and told Pastor Santo to read it. I wanted to convince him that if God has forgiven all sin for all time, then our interpretation of “hell texts” must be wrong! He was more of an annihilationist who believed 90% of people would go to heaven and only 10% would go to hell for annihilation. He did not appreciate “Love Wins” but, nonetheless, he did his own study and found a book called “The Evangelical Universalist” by Gregory McDonald AKA Robin Parry. He embraced universalism hook, line and sinker! Our tiny church, which had shrunk to more of a house church size, became universalistic (believing in universal reconciliation between God and all of humanity). I probably never would have met Pastor Santo if it weren’t for my mother’s deconstruction journey, and I don’t know if I would have become a universalist.
Mum’s death also triggered my embracing my own authenticity. I became much more honest about what I believed, what I felt, and how I interpreted the Bible, than I ever had before. Life is short and I figured if I didn’t become more myself now, I never would! I feared remaining trapped in the masks I put on to be perceived as an acceptable Christian. I never faked loving God, and I didn’t really mean to be fake in my personality (though I probably acted happier than I was), but I was always shying away from sharing my opinions and experiences with other Christians, for fear they would judge me as too radical.
I stopped being afraid in 2012, and I started preaching universalism on Facbeook to my family and friends. I “friended” a lot of “strangers” and met my now husband—in America, no less—on facebook in February 2013. We married two years later.
However, my deconstruction journey didn’t end with universalism. Around the time that I had my first baby—who I mentioned was born in May and turns six this month—I was struggling with a lot of doubt about the existence of God. My daughter was born with a cleft lip and palate. No, that was not the reason I struggled to believe that God existed. But the first six months of her life were extremely difficult. Sleep deprived. I couldn’t breastfeed (because of the clefts) so I expressed breastmilk seven times every single day for seven months, then gradually decreased the amount I expressed until it dried up around eleven months. I was exhausted. And my baby was screaming. Every day. She had cholic, or reflux—essentially both. She never slept for more than a few hours without waking up (until she was eighteen months old). She had her first cleft surgery at six months and her reflux almost immediately ended. Turns out she was probably getting a lot of air through those clefts and it probably caused a lot of gas pain and indigestion. It wasn’t that we didn’t know these things in advance. OMG, doctors and nurses told me so much information when I was 20 weeks pregnant, that I was beside myself. Absolutely overwhelmed. And I remained overwhelmed until M. was at least six months old.
I had expected to feel closer to God when I had a baby. I thought I would marvel at the miracle God had made. That I would bond well with the baby, and the love I felt for the baby would resemble the love God felt for me and bond me to God… Those expectations and ideals didn’t come true for me. I felt more disconnected from God than ever in my life. I felt like a terrible failure as a parent because I couldn’t even conceive a fully formed “healthy” baby, let alone know what to do when that baby screamed bloody murder because of gas pain, or indigestion, or God-only-knows-what, and why, why, why??? I didn’t believe I had postpartum depression, but I was probably right on the cusp of it.
I couldn’t understand how my parents had devotional times or dragged four kids to church on Sundays. I mostly stopped reading the Bible after I had kids. Stopped taking morning walks and had to go for afternoon walks instead. Stopped going to church—actually our house-church dissipated. Almost quit my dream of being a writer. I focused on looking after one, and then two kids, staying on top of the housework, and teaching piano for a few hours a week.
But I missed God too much. I missed fellowshipping with Christians. I felt really empty.
So I dragged my ass back to a church. I had become basically queer-affirming, and found a church that was also queer-affirming, with a female pastor who wasn’t offended by the fact that I was a universalist. This church was focused on making the here-and-now world a more just and loving home for us all, than on the afterlife.
And then Covid happened. Personally, I found Covid to be a very spiritual event. I didn’t believe God sent Covid, or made it happen, or even wanted it to happen. I just believed that God would bring some good things out of this global disaster. I believed change was coming. For everyone. I felt the “spirit moving.”
I had my second (living) baby in June 2020. My husband and I had agreed that we wanted our kids to be born in Australia (mostly because it doesn’t cost anything to have a baby there). And we had been planning for years to move to North Carolina after our two kids were born. This was delayed by the pandemic, but we were still able to move in June 2021.
I saw moving countries as an adventure. What I didn’t see coming or fully comprehend, was the political division of the United States. As I began to put down roots here in NC, making friends and looking for a church—I found a queer-affirming, actively anti-racist church, with female pastors—I began listening to podcasts for the first time ever. And I began hearing about deconstruction and how, in the States, a lot of deconstruction was/is motivated by the Donald Trump presidency and is a backlash to the spread of Christian nationalism. I began reading tons of books—yes, I actually found time to read with two kids and have become a more avid reader today than ever before in my life! And I found myself in a new phase of deconstruction—a more American-socio-political kind of deconstruction. Though I had been deconstructing homophobia for years, it became a more definitive “yes, I’m queer-affirming” by 2022. Racism and sexism take different forms in Australia and America, so I have found myself noticing the “isms” more because of moving countries, and have begun deconstructing those.
Oh and, of course, purity culture. I started deconstructing purity culture well before I got married, but could not bring myself to break the “abstinence until marriage” rule and did not marry until I was thirty-two. The sexual suppression that I experienced was its own kind of religious trauma that I will likely be unpacking for the rest of my life.
More recently, I have been deconstructing rape culture. In fact, I am currently reading a book by Dr. Brenita Mitchell called “Sexual Terrorism” and the statistics and stories therein are absolutely mind-blowing. I also recorded a couple of podcast episodes about rape-culture recently and hope to interview Dr. Brenita soon:
All that to say, this Mother’s Day, I am contemplating my mother, and motherhood/parenthood. I’m contemplating how these have contributed to my deconstruction journey. I am contemplating birth, death, grief, and life’s great big adventures.
Will you join me in contemplation? Particularly around your relationships with your parents and your children (if you have children), and how those relationships have contributed to your deconstruction journey.
I invite you to share your journey with me. I love hearing from people!
You can sign-up for my monthly newsletter at: www.EvangelicalDeconstructionJourney.com/home and you will receive my free ebook deconstructing and reconstructing Biblical “hell texts,” the “unforgiveable sin,” “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” and much more. There is also an Evangelical Deconstruction Journey facebook page, and I am on Instagram and tiktok as @edj.eadyjay.
EDJ is an acronym for Evangelical Deconstruction Journey and also the initials of my first name, maiden name and married surname.
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