A few weeks ago, I hung up the phone after a difficult conversation with my mother.
It wasn’t our first. It probably won’t be our last.
Nothing particularly dramatic happened. No shouting. No final rupture. Just that familiar feeling of speaking from two different worlds—using many of the same words while somehow meaning entirely different things.
Later that evening, Lynette and I sat on our deck as the light slowly disappeared behind the Olympics. We talked about families. About faith. About the strange experience of watching inherited certainties dissolve while still longing to remain connected to the people who handed them to us.
At some point one of us said, “Maybe reconstruction isn’t the right word.”
That notion refused to leave me alone.
For years I’ve listened to people quietly confess over coffee, in classrooms, in spiritual direction, and after lectures, “I’m deconstructing.”
The word has become almost commonplace. Some wear it as a badge of honor. Others whisper it as though confessing a secret. Critics imagine it as demolition. Advocates sometimes celebrate it as liberation. Nearly everyone assumes the destination, if there is one, must be reconstruction.
But what if “reconstruction” isn’t the only possibility?
What if we’ve been asking the wrong question?
Over the next several weeks that conversation on our deck became an essay—far longer than I originally intended. Somewhere around 13,000 words I stopped trying to make it shorter and started trying to make it truer.
This isn’t primarily an essay about Jacques Derrida, though he is an important conversation partner. Neither is it a defense of deconstruction or a manifesto for reconstruction.
It’s an attempt to find language for what I’ve witnessed over more than three decades as a pastor, spiritual director, professor, and fellow traveler alongside hundreds of people who have discovered that the worlds they inherited could no longer hold the truth they had come to know.
I don’t know if the proposal that emerged will resonate with you.
I do know that once I began asking what might lie beyond reconstruction, I found I could no longer see deconstruction—or the journey through it—in quite the same way.
So, fair warning: this is a long read.
Pour a cup of coffee. Take your time. I’d love to know where the conversation leads you. I’ll post it tomorrow.
Peace, dwight
