The D Word: Deconstructing Faith and an Exploration of Spirituality [A Series on Faith Deconstruction]
An introduction to the journey of faith deconstruction and how an out-of-body experience led to me to finding the beauty in humanity outside of the context of my Christian faith tradition.
…Two weeks later my body was laying on an operating table with a hole drilled into my skull and while my neurosurgeon was creating new tunnels in my brain, I was in the corner of the operating room, outside of my body, watching him, and staring at myself.
“It’s time. Are you ready?” asked my neurosurgeon.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” I choked out through nervous tears. I finished telling Aaron where all my passwords were and I had already kissed my toddler twins goodbye that morning through tears, hoping that I would wake up from my impending brain surgery that the neurosurgeon called “simple.” But in my unprofessional opinion, there is nothing “simple” about having a hole drilled in your skull for a stranger to play Pokémon through the gray matter mother board that controls every aspect of my body’s physical existence. If the surgery didn’t kill me, I was hoping that they wouldn’t accidentally cross any wires while they were in my brain, making me, I don't know, all of a sudden only know how to speak German. That’s not even how the brain works but the brain thinks wild thoughts during a state of major anxiety.
The anesthesiologist, whose face was silhouetted by the bright fluorescent lights of the hospital’s pre-op wing, instructed me to count backwards from ten. I’ve had several surgeries before and this is the moment that always astounds me. Every procedure, I play a game with myself to see how long I can last before the anesthesia carries me away into sleep. I do this even though I know I won’t remember what number was my last one once I finally wake up from anesthesia. I just know it’s never long. I’m a lightweight so probably by seven, I’m usually deep into drugged sleep. This time was no different.
Until it was different.
I began counting, hoping to make it to five, when my next dreamy memory from this surgery emerged.
“My jaw looks weird,” I thought as I watched from the corner of the operating room, the neurosurgeon operate on my body. The intubation tube coming out of my mouth pushed my lower jaw back so far that it looked like I had a massive overbite and I thought I looked like a character from The Simpsons. My cartoon-like mouth was the only thing I could focus on as the doctors and nurses whirled away, operating on my physical body.
It was 2016, I was in my early thirties, and I was having brain surgery. I lived with a mystery illness for two years before this final neurosurgeon discovered that the aqueduct in my third ventricle had closed, probably from a long-term viral illness I had a few years prior, and my cerebrospinal fluid had nowhere to flow. All that fluid began backing up in my brain, putting pressure on my optic nerve and my spinal cord and caused a continual deafening rush of fluid in my right ear which caused me to hear my heartbeat in my ear, all day, every day, with no reprieve. This illness was slowly stealing my vision and making the unbearable pressure in my head feel like I was living life walking upside down. I was at a major risk for having a stroke and going blind, ironically after 15 previous doctors told me that this unbearable pressure and constant whooshing in my ear was “simply something you’ll have to live with.” Each doctor gaslighting my existence with this excruciating physical pain had no idea that their dismissal pushed me closer to the point of no longer wanting to live.
“It’s hydrocephalus caused by this aqueductal closure and you’re the perfect candidate for an endoscopic third ventriculostomy.”
When this savior of a neurosurgeon said those words and shared the solution, I melted into sobs of relief.
Two weeks later my body was laying on an operating table with a hole drilled into my skull and a surgeon creating new holes in my brain.
And I was in the corner of the operating room, outside of my body, watching him, and staring at my Marge Simpson overbite.
I have had out of body experiences before. But now that I have language for it, I’d actually call those experiences depersonalization and dissociation because of childhood trauma. Those events are different from what I experienced during my brain surgery. When I was dissociative and walking around in a depersonalized trance, I had intentionally separated my identity from my body because my brain couldn’t handle the events that were happening to me as a child. It was to the point where I was walking around as only a shell of myself. It felt like I had no identity.
As I stared at my unconscious body on the operating table, I was watching what was happening to physical Hannah. I was also the same Hannah watching the surgery unfold, but outside of my body I also existed as someone - something - larger than myself. I was more than what was contained in the physical shell on the operating table. I existed beyond a physical experience. This was entirely different than all those times I had depersonalized to try and escape traumatic situations.
I knew that I was Hannah, but yet I was someone else as well - a larger entity of whom Hannah was only a small percentage. I was fully present but as a larger consciousness, staring at the unconscious meat suit that carries the human everyone knows as Hannah.
And it felt completely natural.
I listened to the beeping of the monitors, the doctor giving instructions, the clinking of instruments…my consciousness moved throughout the room. I started in the corner then meandered around the operating room, floating between nursing staff, around the doctors hands, and taking in the view from above.
There was no fear, no trepidation. Simply observation. I didn’t feel like I was dying and being summoned to The Light that people talk about in their near death experiences. My consciousness was simply outside of my body taking a break, much like we step outside to take a break from a task and be replenished by the sunshine.
My consciousness was in deep observation when suddenly, I was pulled back into my body as if it was a vacuum and I was being suctioned. I woke up on the operating table completely aware that I had just witnessed this very scene from every other perspective outside of my literal person. I tried opening my eyes but I couldn’t. “She’s awake.” I heard the voices around me say. The staff began counting and then I felt my body lifted off of the operating table and onto another solid surface. My eyes were still forced shut but I felt my body being wheeled throughout the physical space of the hospital corridors. And just like every other surgery where I was abruptly awoken from anesthesia and tousled about, I began vomiting.
The peaceful floating consciousness I experienced during surgery was officially over as I was now back in a completely dense and heavy meat suit heaving into a bag being held to my mouth by nursing staff as they wheeled me toward the neuro-intensive care unit.
I recovered well from my surgery and seven years later, I’ve never experienced the same unbearable pressure in my head that I did before surgery.
The only mystery that remains from that time in my medical history is…
How the HELL was I outside of my body?!
I had no context for this experience. Everything I knew about the supernatural I learned in church and in church, the context for human existence is that we’re either dead or we’re alive. There’s no definition or reference that I knew of for an out of body experience like I had. When I wasn’t gaslighting myself, convincing myself that it didn’t really happen, I’ve spent countless meditation hours trying to recreate that experience with no such luck.
Until 2021.
I wasn’t trying to have an out of body experience, but I had one anyway. Without being under anesthesia.
My dad was in his last days of life, in palliative care dying from multiple myeloma. I was estranged from my mother, my abuser, who was his caretaker and who cut off most of my contact with my dying dad. The January 6 insurrection had taken place earlier that year and it flung me into a personal crisis watching such barbaric behavior unfold in a place we never thought was possible. I was in conflict with several close people in my life over their denial of systemic racism and how it affects my Black children. I lost several friends to Trumpism and Covid denial propaganda and we lost our church community because we firmly and consistently spoke up about racism. My spicy medical history couldn’t afford me to be lax with Covid protocols so I was left in the dust by people in my community as they chose prideful, apathetic denial of a deadly, mysterious illness instead of protecting their friend. I was dealing with constant physical pain and suicidal ideation that me, my psychiatrist, and gynecologist knew was because of major hormone imbalances because of Pre-Menstrual Dysphoric Disorder and endometriosis. I was doing everything I could to function in my personal, daily life on top of feeling like I was living in a hellish dystopian society where humans treat one another like animals with no value except for slaughter.
It was two straight years of shit hitting the fan for a lot of the world, and I was no exception.
Who knows how long my alarm was going off on this random, uneventful morning in 2021 before I was pulled out of my blissful dream state and back into a dense, hateful world. I opened my eyes, reached for my phone to turn off the alarm, but something felt off. The difference between this day and every other morning of my life where the exact same event has happened was that my physical body woke up, but I was somewhere else. I felt as though my soul was so tired she needed a longer break from existing as a human and my alarm cut her smoke break short.
“Shit. She’s awake. Gotta get back.” my soul-self bemoaned as she threw down the joint she just rolled and lit, stomped it out, and begrudgingly made her way back into the crampy, hormonal, depressed body she committed herself to for this incarnation. This is the way I imagine the scene in my head.
For maybe ten seconds I laid in my bed with my eyes open, knowing where I was and that it was morning. My brain was present taking in information but I felt like my soul self was absent from my body. My body was merely a shell, like all the dead bodies I’ve seen at open casket funerals over the course of my life. Except I wasn’t dead.
All of a sudden I felt this WHOOSH as if my soul showed up into my person but with the attitude that it knew it was running late to work and gave zero shits.
It was the smallest, fleeting moment but profound enough that I couldn’t shake it.
“I had the weirdest experience…” I told my closest people. “And I don’t know what to do with it.”
I was in the middle of my deconstruction from Evangelical Christianity at this point in my life when my soul-self took her smoke break. I was born and raised in this faith tradition and over the course of the previous two years, after pulling one thread on the tapestry of my faith, the whole picture was unraveling before me. Many will read that and think that sounds tragic.
To me, the unraveling of my faith has been the greatest gift of my life.
It’s been the greatest gift for many reason; At this point in my life, it was a gift because I witnessed my dad’s last few weeks on this earth (before my birth mother cut contact) and countless times as he was nearing the end, I helped stave off his panic attacks over death by reassuring him that as soon as his life ended here, he would be surrounded by more love and peace than he could ever experience here on earth. I only believed this because of my deconstruction from Christianity, not because of the Christian faith tradition I was born into that divided the afterlife into the binary of good and evil, heaven and hell.
After going through the process of faith deconstruction, I have trepidations about speaking from certainty. So I don't speak to others from certainty as if they should apply it to their experience; I speak from certainty that this is what I believe at this point for my own personal human experience. For my dying dad, I spoke with that same certainty to him that I do to myself about death and our human existence. I had to. For him. Any other time in our relationship, if I had shared the beliefs I’d come to regarding faith, spirituality, and Christianity, he would’ve considered me lost and heretical. But on his panicked deathbed, even though it’s unprovable, I had to help him be certain of the Love that was waiting for him in death.
Because that’s what I believe for myself.
I watched my dad fear death, not because death and the mystery itself is scary; I watched my dad have literal panic attacks because he was afraid the Christian Evangelical god wasn’t pleased enough with how he lived his life and would send him to eternal torment.
When I wasn’t there to encourage him that all that was waiting for him on the other side of his life was Divine Love, he spent his last weeks trapped in a hospital bed bargaining with god, having panic attacks over the fear of a literal hell.
Watching a beautiful soul of a human that you love so much be tormented on their deathbed because of the threat of eternal torment, is hell…for the both of you.
Sitting with another human in the presence of their impending death is a sacred act. As long as no one is being harmed, I’ve come to hold other’s faith beliefs in their living with sacred reverence, even if I don’t ascribe to those same beliefs. As dad drifted further and further away, I sang hymns with him, read him the Psalms, prayed to Jesus with him…all practices I no longer ascribe to for myself. But in the presence of death, I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit by and let anyone suffer the kind of terror I witnessed my dad suffer over his eternal fate because of that belief that he “hadn’t accepted Jesus as his Savior enough.”
Where is Christ’s love in that kind of fear? In such a vulnerable state for a human to be in? It’s inhumane. I may hold the living’s beliefs as sacred but I will hold the dying’s humanity just as sacred.
Faith deconstruction is a reminder of our humanity-
In ourselves and in our fellow humans.
The events that have occurred in my personal faith deconstruction path allowed me to gift my father peace, assurance, and serenity when I was around him as he lived out his last few weeks on this earth. If I can share my deconstruction experience as an offering to another person who is tormenting themselves with the idea of being condemned to a literal hell if they chose a path that the American Evangelical Church labels heretical or evil, then I will have done what my soul came here to do; to offer the story of my human experience as a gift to my fellow wayfarers to see their own deconstruction experience as simply, a part of their own human story.
I’m not writing this as an apologetics manual for deconstructionists to prove others wrong; Deconstruction in itself is a story of individual human experience. There is no quantifying something so extraordinary as our personal human experiences.
I’m writing this series (and maybe an eventual book) on deconstruction because we’ve theologized the human experience to the point where we have pathologized it. Much like a doctor who has pathologized their patients to the point where they forget their humanity and see those people only as specimens for their study, so has the Church pathologized humans with that denomination's specific standard of theology. In doing so, we’ve lost the exact gift that was given to us to begin with…
The gift of being human.
Faith deconstruction is a reminder of our humanity-
In ourselves and in our fellow humans.
I write this series on faith deconstruction to remind us of this wonderful gift of being human.
If I can share my deconstruction experience as an offering to another person who is tormenting themselves with the idea of being condemned to a literal hell if they chose a path that the American Evangelical Church labels heretical or evil, then I will have done what my soul came here to do; to offer the story of my human experience as a gift to my fellow wayfarers to see their own deconstruction experience as simply, a part of their own human story.
To support my work, please consider sharing this article, subscribing, or upgrading to a paid subscription.
Like my writing but can't commit to a paid monthly subscription?