In which I share the first chapter of my unreleased book, Doubt Becomes Wonder — plus, a hefty discount for u!

As promised, I begin to share content from my book (which I wrote and did not publish)

There are a lot of reasons I didn’t publish Doubt Becomes Wonder; I am still in the middle of paying back the portion of the advance I had received to write it. Chief among my reasons was this: after a lifetime of being on stages large and small talking about God, I got … exhausted? Seeing burnout hovering ahead of me like the smoke from a forest fire, I made the very difficult decision to pull back from my plan to be a Successful Spiritual Author™️ and let my metamorphosis (which, for me at least, must necessarily include some kind of period of utter darkness and loss of my sense of identity) actually take place.

Did you know that before a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it dissolves completely into a shapeless and formless liquid goo in the chrysalis? Yeah, I didn’t either, but when I learned that (from, as it happens, Martha Beck’s incredible book “the Way Of Integrity) I said something really articulate like “Oh. F*** me. Yep.”

Well, anyway, releasing this book so soon after so much widespread and systemic inner change in myself felt premature and unwise to me, so I didn’t. But I do want to share some of the stories in it, and that’s part of why I started The Violet Fields in the first place. So here you go!

BUT first; I’m happy to tell you that I am releasing a discount code on tickets to my 7/7 online event “U R UR GURU”, for all readers (paid and free) of this newsletter. Just use the promo code “violet” when checking out and you’ll get $30 off at any ticket level, including the video download tier. If you need a reminder as to what this strangely titled event is, you can check it out at ururguru.eventbrite.com.

I really really hope you’ll consider “attending.” It would mean a lot to me, yes, because I am always grateful for a chance to share with you, learn from you, and also yes feed my kids. If you know someone who would like to attend feel free to share your code with them. Gas prices be crazy

And if you already purchased a ticket, shoot me an email at audreyassad@gmail.com and we can get the discount sorted

Oooookay. :deep breaths:

Without further ado, here is the prologue to my un-released book, Doubt Becomes Wonder.

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Prologue:

A trickle of water can carve a canyon out of a mountain, if given the time and space.

As a child, I did my best to cobble together pictures of a god I could love believing in. I made these mosaics with whatever beautiful things I could find. I gatheredthe smooth stones and sea glass and saltwater taffy of the nearby windblown Jersey shore; I wove in the mulled-over and meditated-on psalms that I had committed to memory in song since I was young; I painted with the long and low-lying shadows of golden hour, the northeastern wind in the cherry blossom trees; all of thiswas how I formed god's picture. I crafted god somewhat in my own image, and in the images of the places and people I loved. For a few years, all was relatively peaceful. It was a wonderful way to worship God—to look inward, upward, and outward for all the best and brightest and most beautiful things we can see, and weave them into an ever-evolving kaleidoscope of meaning and mattering and mothering and fathering and awe and wonder. Before I ever understood God to be a Divinely appointed mix of Santa Claus and the Krampus, deeply interested in both my good behavior and my punishment, my God was made of mist in the low-rolling New Jersey hills and cold Atlantic saltwater, my tear stained face in the mirror, and my fingers on our magical little apartment-sized uprightpiano. I didn’t even really have to learn how to play the piano, because I just knew; I didn’t really have to learn how to pray, either. I was a Child, and I just knew.

I was raised in a New England idyll of postage stamp lawns and Cape Cod houses and Italian grandmothers sitting in driveways on plastic lawn chairs holding plates of cookies. Along with a small gaggle of other children, I roamed and explored an approved range of the small grid of streets surrounding our little 40x100 lot on Church Avenue in Scotch Plains, NJ; we rode our bikes to Forest Park for hopscotch and four-square and furtive conversations about boys behind the bleachers. We went to the drug store to pick up colorful and wildly embellished stationary for our notes in school; to spend our allowances on Skittles and Starburst to put in our candy boxes for leisurely hours of trading.

My brothers, both younger than me, trailed along with me more often than not in these neighborhood crawls. Jon-Paul, two years younger than me, was dashingly handsome even as a child—even then, my ten year old girlfriends were confessing their crushes on him and giggling at my annoyed and rolling eyes.  My brotherstrode confidently around town in soccer shorts and Adidas slip on sandals until it got below forty degrees (my mother’s rule) and then he would reluctantly dontearaway soccer pants for the winter. He had a thick and shining head of chestnut hair; his mouth was full of largeand bright white teeth that flashed smiles beneath twinkling brown eyes. He was charming, magnetic, funny, hot-tempered, and a favorite wherever he went. In the best way, he relished in it. He was able to bask in the glow of adoration that surrounded him. I, on the other hand, was a painfully awkward bundle of limbs and laughter held inside. I didn’t laugh loudly in front of very many people, or say what I was really thinking very often. I was terrified to expose myself to ridicule. I’m not sure if this is why I was bullied in school from as early as I can remember, or if it was the bullying that made me that way; another un-answerable chicken-and-egg question.For a variety of reasons, I was laughed at and teased by many of my peers throughout my childhood. I got good grades, I loved school, I was musical, I was diffident. My habit of peering shyly up and out at the world through wide and worried eyes developed early.

I was a chatterbox at home, but often in religious or school environments I kept my thoughts and opinions to myself, probably partially due to my understanding of gender roles at the time. But even from a young age I had trouble reconciling the god who shrugged his shoulders at the suffering of the world with what I was hearing about god's love and mercy at church.  My questions about the problem of pain (also something about which Lewis wrote eloquently) were dismissed as, at best, unimportant and, at worst, dangerous. I was warned about the slippery slope of even asking such questions. I shyly raised a hand in Sunday School one late morning, bathed in the harsh rays of noon-light that streamed in truncated columns through the windows of the half basement of our church building. I had been taught from early on that it was the place of a woman to learn in silence, so for me, raising my hand in Sunday School felt quietly but truly brazen—especially to challenge an idea that was being communicated. I asked how it was possible that God could order the Israelites to kill anyone—especially children. I expressed that it felt really frightening to imagine that that were true, and didn’t line up with how I thought God was.

Not surprisingly, the answer came that the God of the Old Testament, although the same God we worshipped in 1990 in New Jersey in a musty old church basement, was bound by a different covenant and therefore His own rules for Himself and His people were different—that His thoughts were higher than our thoughts and His ways higher than our ways. My Sunday School teacher, who was a well-meaning and kind soul with raven curls pouring out all over her shoulders and framing even blacker eyes, which smiled down at me throughout my childhood, informed me that the questions I was asking were the sort that led to trouble, to backsliding, and to worldliness. She told me in no uncertain terms that they were  the wrong questions, and I made an agreement with that. In that moment I internalized, whether or not she meant for this to happen, that my intuition and my own instincts were not part of the conversation about spirituality and faith that I was having. I added the glass shards of conversations like these to my spiritual mosaics, and I began forming a portrait that increasingly disturbed my spirit. This further formed my psyche into the tormented and angst-riddled place that landed me in trauma therapy in my thirties.

Slowly but surely, through experiences like bringing up genocide in Sunday School, harsher and morelegalistic voices—both internally and externally—began to take over my spiritual process. My portraits of god eventually grew terrifying and troubling, and they kept me up in the night instead of keeping me company. The god I worshipped for most of my youth was a sordid and sadistic being, although I dutifully ascribed to him the best and kindest of intentions. This god seemed to completely ignore the brutality of the universe, which always appeared to work relentlessly against god's own compassion and justice. The god I believed in seemed to operate outside the bounds of his own moral code, which he had etched into stone tablets of law. I believed god existed above my reason, even though my pictures of him were entirely (and necessarily) confined to that reason.

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It frankly feels both disheartening and embarrassing to remember how I articulated the Christian gospel to my childhood friends. My existential terror and legalistic religious ideas bled easily into my friendships, and although I was a painfully shy kid, I occasionally got the nerve up to bear witness to my seven-year-old pals. I was frightened for both them and myself, and deeply anxious to secure our eternal safety, so I offered up this gospel to them as if it were a vaccination you could buy at a clinic: soul salvation through a cold steel needle. Just say this prayer, and you will be immune. It seemed to me that weneeded Jesus to inoculate us against ourselves. So I gave myself a Jesus-injection every night, sometimes hundreds of times, repeating the “sinner's prayer” ad nauseam. I was so worried I hadn't gotten it quite right, or that it hadn't ‘taken.’  I heard the words “grace” and “mercy” a lot, but I couldn't seem to internalize them. I flagellated myself for my doubt, for my weakness, for my persistent and frustrating humanity.

If I was taking the medicine of Christ's blood every day to cure my disease, why wasn't it working, and why didn't I have the “blessed assurance” we kept singing about in church? What was broken about me?

In my closely-held theology of a god who could sentence me to death without a second thought (but for the convincing arguments of that Wonderful Counselor behind whom I hid) there existed a deep and heart-crushing wound of abandonment. The story of me and my god was a tale of being left. My god had given me over to my own brokenness, which I assumed was just and right. It was surely what I deserved—that god did not desire me, that god was not with me, that god was against me because of my sinfulness and doubt.  My god informed everything about how I lived my life and how I engaged in relationships. Because my god was picky and judgmental and narrow-minded, so was I. I didn’t worry very much about justice for the poor, because the god I worshipped didn’t either. That god was much more concerned with getting people to a future heaven (while allowing them to choose eternal conscious torment instead) than he was with healing or helping them on earth. The god whose portraits hung on the walls of my mind was mostly concerned with regulating humanbehavior, and I went about my father's business with gusto.

As for Jesus Christ—in my childish mind's eye, he seemed to be something of a public defender, a litigator assigned to argue for my deliverance in my god’s loud and chaotic Dickensian court. I was the accused, and he the official advocate. In my pictures, Jesus showed up to plead my case as though it were his job—and in my head, that’s what it was; salvation was Jesus’ profession, his job, his talent. I trusted him with my life because, well, he was the expert.

I engaged his services with gratitude, but not for one moment did I mistake them for real affection; I couldn’t seem to divorce his treatment of me from my fear that he only loved me because he had to. God was merciful, kind, and good, I was told—I used the language of Lover dutifully (I am my Beloved’s, and He is mine) but continued to live and believe as though Jesus were my attorney. This belief bled into all my theology and anthropology and,unbeknownst to me, began to infect my health. I had no idea any of this was happening until trauma symptoms physically emerged, and therapy revealed the costly flaws in my thinking.

Sometime in the summer of 2016 I walked into the airy and spacious marble foyer of the Catholic Church on the corner by our hotel. I was there with my husband at the time, William, for a short vacation we had tacked onto the end of a work event, as we often did. It was a crisp and bright and breezy Sunday morning, and we had looked up nearby Mass times so we could attend, walking over after overpriced hotel coffee and poached eggs. I don’t remember much about this particular morning, considering what took place during the service, but I do recall William’s jeans, dark and stiff and cuffed, making slight brushing noises on the shiny wooden pew as we slid in a tad late; and his tan Redwing boots, scuffed and darkened from wear resting in pleasing contrast on the white marble floor. A few moments later, as the Old Testament readings concluded, the Gospel alleluia was sung. The priest held the ceremonial Scripture text aloft, as always, and processed to the podium for the Gospel readings. “The Lord be with you,” he intoned, and we murmured in chorus “and with your spirit.”

I’d done this all a thousand times. There was nothing out of the ordinary or strange or new about the experience, except the strange feeling of simmering orange urgency coming up through my body. It began in my sacral area and started spreading up through my gut to my rib cage. I began tapping my feet and fingers, looking left to right rapidly. My heart was racing and I was starting to sweat. What was going on? William looked at me with concern. “What’s wrong?” he whispered. “I don’t know,” I said in hushed tones, on the verge of tears. “I have to get out of here.” I gathered my stuff and walked swiftly down the aisle and burst out into the northwestern sun, the words of Jesus being read by the priest still floating behind me on the puff of cool air following me out the doors.

I began calming down almost as immediately as I found myself in the sunshine and out of what I considered to be the house of God. To say that I was mystified would be an understatement. William and I puzzled over this as we walked around, and I tried to shake off the feeling of churning anxiety. I worried that it would happen again. And happen again, it certainly did; every time I walked into a church from that day forward, I dealt with some version of the same experience. Sometimes it was extreme, sometimes mild, but ever-present. This presented me with some rather severe difficulty in doing my work, as most of the places I traveled to play and sing were churches.

For the rest of the summer, which was fairly full of concerts on my calendar, I found ways to midwife myself through the seething waves of anxiety of playing music in environments that, for reasons which were mysterious to me then, caused me so much inner turmoil. I would arrive from the airport to the hotel, shower and change, talking to myself just like I did during my labors with my babies. “You can do this,” I’d repeat to myself. “You are doing this. In a few hours you will have done this.” A moment of calm, then another surge of fear ballooning up through my heart into my throat. Deep breath in through the nose, release slowly through the mouth. “You can do this. You are doing this. In a few hours you will have done this.” Rinse and repeat. I’d arrive at the church doing my utmost to express gratitude and smile at the people hosting me; as soon as they’d leave me in whatever generously lent church office was my dressing room that day, I’d fold up into a chair or onto the floor, holding my own body with both arms, breathing, fearing, breathing, repeating. Several weeks after the first anxiety attack I had also begun experiencing physical tics in my hands. I remember one particular day before a show in Indianapolis when I looked fearfully at my tour manager David as my right thumb jerked left and right without my permission. I had to do at least a solid hour of deep breathing to calm it down enough for me to go out and manage to play my songs. After the concert or prayer night had ended, I’d hide in my dressing room, sometimes in tears. I never went out to talk to people. I couldn’t even imagine how I’d get through meeting kind souls who just wanted to thank me, look me in the eyes and tell me they got healing from what I did. I was grateful, but I couldn’t even meet their eyes in the state I’d be in. One night after a theater show in Pennsylvania, at which I’d experienced somewhat less anxiety than normal (likely due to the glaring lack of crucifixes and baptismal fonts) but after I left the stage I crumped into a heap. I had my dressing room locked, but a few people had found their way to it and were knocking and calling my name and giggling outside the door; I freaked and locked myself in the bathroom, huddled on the floor holding my knees and rocking back and forth, crying quietly.

This—the exhausting routine I had to perform just tosurvive one normal night of showing up to a church or theater and playing songs for people who had purchased tickets to be there—was clearly not going to work. So I made what is a very difficult decision for any artist, and canceled a whole fall of shows; I decided to take some time off to stay home, rest, and figure out what was going on in my heart and mind and body. I had been coming home from the road in tatters, and my family life was suffering. So I got off the road and into trauma therapy with a woman named Susan. After meeting with her for an intake session, in which she evaluated the extent of my suffering and therefore my treatment needs, she recommended a two day one-on-one intensive followed by at least ten EMDR sessions, more if necessary. All this was going to cost near ten thousand dollars, so I applied for a grant from the Grammy Foundation and waited for approval. To my deep gratitude, it cleared, and in the silence left behind by the complete and utter halting of my usual travel and work, I began a new work of excavation and healing.

On the first day of our intensive, Susan suggested that I look at the piano keys and imagine that each of them was a member of my first church. We’d not had pastors growing up, so I mentally morphed the piano into a whole chorus of different teaching voices I remembered from childhood. Brother James, who tearfully pled with us 'why not tonight?' every single summer at our yearly bible conference. My Sunday School teacher, who quantified my logical questions about Old Testament genocide as dangerous. And I’d be remiss to leave out my abuser, who to this day glibly and charmingly teaches Bible Study on the faded floors of a little wooden church I long ago left behind.

I stared at the keys in silence. I'd never really done role play in therapy before, and I can't say it felt natural or even helpful at the time. But Susan nodded encouragingly. “Tell them whatever you want to tell them.”

I took a shallow breath and muttered, awkwardly “I was so terrified of your higher power.”

But one day my sweet therapist Lou looked at me kindly one day from the depths of his soft chair and stroked his round, grey bearded chin after I had actually stood up and yelled at the top of my lungs about something, and he uttered the words I'll never forget; ‘your symptoms are consistent with those of PTSD. I am going to refer you to a trauma therapist.’

Trauma? PTSD? From what, exactly? I scanned my memories for anything I considered violent or scarring enough to make sense of what he'd said. All I could find was a chronic slow drip of terror that, it turned out, had been enough to cause the scary and disruptive symptoms I was experiencing.

Thanks to Susan’s help and my own corresponding healing, I began to realize that this fomented "faith" driven mostly by a paralyzing fear of hell wasn't sustainable long term. Nor was it compatible with the emergence of better mental health that I was finally getting a taste of through therapy, which I desperately needed and desired. I had spent what felt like a million moments flashing forward to a future hell, vacillating between gratitude that Christ had died to save me from it and a feeling of tormented worry that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it in the end. I beat back my insistent questions about how a loving God could conceptualize such a place, let alone create and fill it with souls. Every decision I made as a child was happening in the foreground of a background conversation; the possibility of hell took up so much CPU in my processing that I can’t say I ever had a conversation with myself where it wasn’t present as a contributing voice. I have a vivid memory of being in class on the last day of sixth grade, looking out the window at the cloudless sky, the trees full with chlorophyll-rich leaves and swaying in the warm summer air, and thinking to myself that hell wouldn’t have these things. Hell wasn’t just an idea to me—I bore in my person a combination of logic and sensitivity that made it nearly impossible for me to perform the kind of cognitive dissonance it would take not to live in terror. The more I unpacked this, I saw that it was no wonder that I had reached the point where I couldn’t even say the word ‘God’ without a surge of panic. All along, I’d been imagining that God had created a place where some people would go to suffer in timeless permanence; no relief, no end, no drink of water to soothe. I would see a fresh and brand new baby girl at the mall in a stroller and wonder if she was going to heaven or hell when she died. Hell had kept me in prison while I was alive, and I was beyond ready to break out.

The more I grew as a person and learned about mental health and emotional wellness, the more I realized I couldn't hold this kind of spiritual terror in healthy tension with spiritual wellness. I grew bold enough to wonder if maybe this god I had been serving was mostly a construction of my own mind, and perhaps more of a projection of my own psyche than I had realized. I began to see how a society can help us create god in its own preferred images:

god, the colonialist

god, the imperialist

god, the executioner

god, the cold-hearted judge

god, the cop

god, the jailor

Did my legalistic upbringing create my religious obsession and my ideas about God's nature, or was it the other way around? Did my traumas and mental wellness (or lack thereof) form my faith, or was my faith the source of the trauma and the formation of my mental wellness? I couldn't seem to answer these questions. I also couldn't help but wonder if faith was worth quietly leaving behind if it was disrupting my life and relationships and causing this much anxiety.

In my mid-twenties, while I was working at a Baptist church and still in the clutches of fundamentalist thinking, I stumbled across a surprising idea from a writer I deeply loved and trusted. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis wrote, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

I was struck by his easy statement about the fallibility of his ideas of God. I had never felt that kind of freedom when it came to the pictures of God I was given. But after a frustrating and anxious brush with nihilism I found the idea of this type of deconstruction and rebuilding to be a very hopeful one. It felt like a drink of water in the desert to imagine that I could actually be a person of faith who regularly let their images of God be shattered and rebuilt. That seemed like a faith practice that could free and fill me.

I resolved to dismantle my heart’s cathedrals, and burn whatever art and icons I needed to. Brick by metaphorical brick, I laid waste to the ramshackle buildings my fear had raised—I raged against the machine. I set fire to the rotting carcass of my fundamentalist beliefs. It was a violent inner process; I felt a desperate and angry need to level everything and start again. So that is exactly what I did. I began to tear apart my notions of heaven, hell, God, and self. I couldn’t figure out a way to take one thing apart without taking it all apart—it was so immediately clear to me that the entire structure from which I was operating in the world was tangled up in itself so entirely that I couldn’t pull one thread out of it without unraveling the whole. For roughly three years I read and I discussed and I cried to my therapist and I lay awake at night pondering. First hell fell; then hierarchy, then the homogenous White Christianity I hadn’t even been aware I was espousing for so many years. I read Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward. I read James Cone’s God Of The Oppressed. I read books by all the authors that people had warned me away from. And not surprisingly, my beliefs tumbled one upon the other like so many dominoes, and I began to understand why so many leaders in my churches had cautioned me against the line of questioning I had repeatedly attempted to undertakethroughout my childhood and adolescence. My cathedrals were ornate, fragrant with incense, and full of sincere belief—but all the same they were built on the sand. I burned them down because I had no choice if I wanted to rediscover he ground of being and see what laybeneath the rubble.

After I was done, hand still clasping the torch and lungs choking in the smoldering air, I waited.

When the smoke cleared, to my great astonishment, a tree remained. Like the burning acacia tree of Exodus, it had not been consumed by the fire I had set. It was evergreen, breathing and pulsating with life and colorand vitality. In gazing at it, I wondered if perhaps I could stay in the garden after all. Maybe life after belief wasn’t the wasteland I thought it needed to be, but rather a place where I could put my hands in the dirt and see what arose from the ground.

Perhaps God was not capricious or calamitous. Perhaps God was not petty or small. Maybe the love of God was the sea in which I floated, not some shoreline in the distance. At the end of all the destruction, amid the rubble of my fury, I found that these words of Merton's rang out like cathedral bells: “…for God is with me, and He sits in the ruins of my heart, preaching His Gospel to the poor.” The more willing I was to destroy my idols of god, the poorer in spirit I became—and the more my eyes opened to God's peaceful and unmoved presence in the aftermath of losing belief.

As I stared steadily at the piano keys that hot July afternoon in 2016 with Susan, I pulled my knees close to me under a heavy blanket in spite of the summer swelter.  Anxiety hummed in my chest like a motor, and I let the tears well up and spill down my face as I expressed my pain, my grief, my regret, and even my anger. Susan coached me through it, and when my speaking drew naturally to an end I felt deeply quiet. It was as if the exercise had taken one of the loudly chattering voices in my head and shooed it out to play in the yard. There was much more work to do, but it was a beautiful beginning.

Since that day, I have sat in the ruins of my idols. I have seen the scorched earth after the wildfires of deconstruction--my heart's forests cleansed and purified, burned to the ground. In these ruins I have been able to identify my spiritual trauma, and to chart a new course into healing and wholeness. I have seen that perhaps the process of losing touch with everything I thought I knew could have been more peaceful and loving and soft—deconstruction doesn’t have to mean the entire loss of peace, much less the entire loss of faith. This is my attempt to tell that story. I started out my deconstruction with a hammer and now I hold a spade. I have learned to be softer with myself as I root out what is rotten or dying.

God had never left me, because God never had to arrive in me. I have always been in Christ, and Christ in me. These ruins I have made are not the ruins of God, but of the portraits of god that I put together. The rebuilding of these ruins is tantamount to my growth and healing. The destruction of what amounts to a poorly curated museum of garish caricatures of God has been a deeply creative and nourishing act; and God was the sledge with which I shattered it. But, seeing as my icons will have to be taken down over and over throughout my life, I have learned to prune more than demolish—to garden more than destroy.  Doubt, or the loss of belief, is an opportunity—a sacred invitation into a life of curiosity and wonder.

Are we vulnerable and brave enough to embrace the spiritual process of doubt? Sometimes we choose these shatterings, but more often they seem to choose us. However our ruins may have come to us, I am hopeful that this book offers us each a way to enter lovingly and creatively into the lifelong process of trading doubt for wonder.